Pac-10’s Image Gaining Luster

The Pacific 10 Conference’s effort to increase the level of difficulty of every team’s schedule seems to be paying off.

With conference play starting this week, seven of the 10 teams are above .500 -- the biggest surprise being California at 7-2 -- and only two teams (Washington State and USC) are under .500.

There is a feeling among coaches that the conference has raised its national profile to where the Pac-10 is seen as having more than one or two NCAA tournament-worthy teams.

“As a coaching group we talked last spring of stepping up and challenging ourselves. We have met [the challenge] head on,” said Oregon Coach Bev Smith, whose 6-3 team spent a month in the top 25 before falling out this week.

“You can see the conference’s overall win-loss record is pretty good. Even with some of the losses, the Pac-10 has made a statement that we are a competitive conference. In the past we would all not have played those kind of high-profile games. Now, I think, we’ve erased some of that doubt about us.”

Overall the Pac-10 is 60-28 against nonconference opponents. It hasn’t done that well against ranked teams, going 3-15. But some of the losses were still eye-openers.

USC missed last-second shots that could have forced overtime against No. 1 Connecticut and No. 13 Colorado. No. 9 Stanford took No. 2 Tennessee into overtime before losing. Washington gave No. 3 Texas Tech its best game before losing by four. Cal also played well against the Red Raiders, losing by seven.

On the plus side, Oregon took out then-No. 10 Louisiana State, Oregon State defeated then-No. 21 Utah, and Stanford defeated then-No. 10 Georgia.

UCLA still has a home game with No. 18 Ohio State on Dec. 30.

“There are lot of positive indicators that we have done some things right,” USC Coach Chris Gobrecht said.

“It has raised the RPI rating of the conference. Now when we play in conference we won’t lose ground. And that’s huge. We did miss some huge wins that would have catapulted the Pac-10 to the top. But the conference has done a better job of showing when we beat teams in conference it means something.”

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Add Gobrecht: Whenever she starts a sentence with “I’ll probably get in trouble for this,” you know there is something she has on her mind that, later on, will get her a long chat with Pac-10 Commissioner Tom Hansen.

Nonetheless, when asked why the Pac-10 didn’t do better against ranked teams, Gobrecht offered this theory.

“When we go on the road and play at New Mexico or Notre Dame, we know we will be disadvantaged from an officiating standpoint,” she said. “You accept that as part of being on the road. So if you win it is significant. But we don’t get any advantage at home.

“The good and bad news is, the Pac-10 is the most fairly called conference in the nation; officials here do the most accurate job of calling the game the way it’s supposed to be called. That is well and good for opponents, but we lose the edge other places get.”

The difference, Gobrecht said, is the Pac-10 “is a sophisticated conference. We have WNBA officials working here. There’s not the small-town pressure of seeing the same people again.

“It’s a different world out here. We have top-level universities in big cities. But we lose something with that. If we had the same kind of breaks that the Tennessees and Texas Techs get, there would be more ‘Ws’ on our books.”