By Mark Schipper
George Kliavkoff, a major operator in digital-television and a sports-entertainment executive at MGM Resorts International, was hired in the late spring of 2021 to replace Larry Scott as commissioner of the Pac-12 Conference.
Kliavkoff took over on the first day of July but had been meeting with the conference's membership for the previous six weeks, attempting to build an allied strategy between the schools before approaching a treacherous landscape in college athletics. That was an activity, talking to athletic administrators and seeking a smart consensus, that did not interest his predecessor and was of a piece with a long list of grievances that led to an early end to Scott's eleven-year tenure.
Everywhere Scott came up short, from the crucial negotiations around media rights—where the league has fallen far behind its peers in wealth and exposure—to creating a unified plan to let football lead the brand, Kliavkoff has to succeed if the league is to survive. And for the Pac-12, where there has been a devastating absence of savvy leadership, the change at the top is meant to fill the void at a revolutionary moment in the history of college athletics.
The modern conference commissioner is expected to serve as a brand ambassador and promoter, a tough representative of his schools’ interests in the media rights and marketing spaces, and a well-connected deal-maker across multiple sports-related industries. The job has evolved into a vital post at the same rate that college football has transformed from a hybrid academic-athletic endeavor into an almost unalloyed sports-entertainment property worth billions of dollars to those who bankroll the sport.
But this high-salaried position and its relatively glamorous responsibilities were not the original purview of league CEOs. Old-school commissioners mostly came out of the academy, where they'd come of age with the collegiate model, or from the National Collegiate Athletic Association bureaucracy, where they'd been plugged into the operating system and knew how to make it work. The rest had backgrounds in the military or federal law enforcement, which gave them a transferrable education on the top-down bureaucratic process that the colleges used. But no matter where they started from, as commissioners they were deputized as combination overseers, detectives, and law-enforcement officials within their territories.
The original commissioners were tasked with monitoring their membership for strict compliance with conference rules and NCAA bylaws. They were responsible for enforcing the rulebook at home while serving as a liaison between their leagues and the NCAA's national office. The position was meant to be an open line between the far-flung conferences and the NCAA's headquarters in Chicago and, later, Kansas City, Missouri.
Walter Byers, the man who engineered the modern NCAA while serving as its first executive director from 1951 through 1988, watched this slow sea change happen with the commissioners. He described it in his 1995 memoir, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes.
“Present-day conference commissioners emphasize compliance programs and rules seminars [as opposed to overseeing and enforcing them]. They negotiate TV contracts, run conference championships, and argue for larger money grants from the NCAA. They serve as diplomats who are expected to negotiate differences with the NCAA. Promoters and diplomats have more fun than prosecutors. They leave tough enforcement matters to the NCAA.”
The fatal flaw in the old style was exposed in the years following the NCAA's first television contract in 1951. As money began pouring into the sport in exchange for broadcasting rights, the fast accumulation of wealth and prestige, and the thrilling opportunity to pursue more with each new contract, escalated the risks cutthroat programs were willing to run in pursuit of the sport's most-lucrative prizes.
A rules-monitoring program that relied on strict honesty and collegiality was fouled by the conflicted arrangement commissioners had with their leagues. The schools directly employing the man who was tasked with holding them to the law was tricky enough when the spoils were modest, generated through ticket sales and concessions at the home ballpark. But when the bags of gold that television delivered began to pile up, a tremendous awkwardness emerged between the universities and the commissioners who forced them to comply with an increasingly reviled rule book.
Further complicating the sport's moral order was the elevation of top coaches to a hallowed cultural tier. From far-off figures roaming the sidelines prior to television, they became as recognizable as movie stars. Centered up on people's screens on autumn Saturdays, stoically pacing the battle pitch with their squad of gladiators arrayed behind them, coaches came to represent a classical kind of Americanism. They were seen as important shapers of the nation's youth and defenders of the nation's sacred values. The winningest coaches rose to levels of fame that put them almost beyond the reach of any individual school or league.
As a consequence of these changes, the presidents, chancellors, and athletic directors that oversaw the sport were under immense pressure to facilitate competitive excellence at any cost, and not just from the coaches who refused to be out-resourced by their rivals, but from the football-loving trustees, donors, and alumni who identified intensely with the program's success. For the football-ambitious universities it was a cold war all the time with fighting season in the fall.
But winning big at football has always gone hand in hand with a degradation of a school's academic mission and the tolerance of a certain amount of technically illegal benefits and privileges to accrue to its top athletes. So if a university president and athletic director were in agreement with their head coach that the rules could be bent and broken for the greater good of the institution, they knew also that at some point they would encounter the man they had hired to police their league, and slip around him.
As the sport grew into a big business as well, it became professionally dangerous for commissioners to indict their own programs for transgressions committed in the pursuit of victories. The commissioner who stepped forward to expose a successful program for non compliance would be received something like an old-time prohibition agent who'd kicked in the door on New Year's Eve to seize the booze and send the revelers to jail. He would find a precious few to watch his back as he went to work and fewer still would even comprehend his zealous position on the matter.
The game's power programs began to frame this self-policing arrangement as an idiotic form of self-sabotage. They believed the self-reporting of violations that could be found all over the country, and that would lead to sanctions against their own programs, to be a kind of Horatio Alger simplicity that the other, more realistic schools would exploit for their own gain.
THE PCC COMES OF AGE, AND TURNS ON ITSELF
The conference commissioner that we know today rose to life, Phoenix like, from the charred wreckage of the Pacific Coast Conference. While the PCC is the direct, genetic ancestor of the current Pac-12, its original incarnation was annihilated between 1956 and 1959 in a firestorm of scandal and malice. The end game had come shortly after its venerable commissioner, Victor O. Schmidt, was forced to resign for the crime of enforcing the league's bylaws with too much integrity.
This dissolution and reconstitution of the West Coast's premier league occurred just as the sport was sloughing off what remained of its so-called amateur nature. The colleges had been collecting television checks for less than a decade, but the the sport's capacity to generate greater revenue was becoming a preoccupation. The schools had jettisoned the NCAA's Sanity Code, the first truly national set of eligibility standards, with extreme prejudice. And the Full Ride scholarship—the so-called “pay for play”—that marked a fundamental change in the NCAA's policy toward compensating athletes, was about to take effect.
The collapse of the old, pre-television order was accelerated by the calamity out West, where the PCC had run the show since 1915. What amplified the shock of the disaster was the league's reputation as an ultra-strict, faculty-controlled, academically-serious operation. From the outside it appeared to be the model for student-athlete amateurism.
"We wanted students playing at athletics, and not athletes playing as students," said Robert Sproul, president at the University of California.
The first commissioner of the PCC was FBI agent Ed Atherton, a Georgetown University man who had been invited in the middle 1930s to audit the conference after reports of dishonesty and chicanery within the ranks had run up and down the coast. After Atherton submitted a comprehensive, two-million word report on the integrity, or lack thereof, within the league's mission, he was hired by the conference in 1939 to keep it clean.
Atherton was invested by the league's academics with immense authority to investigate, indict, and punish programs that broke the rules He had served quietly and efficiently in that role for five years when he unexpectedly dropped dead in 1945, aged 47 years. It was a shocking loss to the league, which had been elated by how active Atherton was in flushing out and punishing perfidy. He was replaced by the aforementioned Schmidt, his protege.
The league carried on as before in those first years under Schmidt. The NCAA's Sanity Code, which had gone into effect in 1948, lasted only two years before it proved spectacularly unpopular with every league except the Big Ten and PCC. In 1949, anxious they might miss an opportunity to batter their own schools with the Code, the PCC fined multiple programs between $55,000 and $120,000 for sundry violations of the rules. That particular action—fining its own schools under a set of rules that were about to go extinct—sparked a vicious rebuke from The Los Angeles Times:
“The dear dull dillies who control the PCC proved themselves once again either so hypocritical or so stupidly ineffective that it verges on the ludicrous to place them in a position of power and authority."
But the Sanity Code fines were of a piece with the PCC's personality. It was a league that did not hesitate to suspend its flagship football programs for infractions that would be ignored in other regions. The academics in charge of the PCC were the kind of administrators that would, for the simple pleasure of settling King Football's hash, float proposals to unilaterally outlaw spring practice, or forbid participation in post-season games because the regular season was long enough already.
Up until 1975 the conference would send just one program, its league champion, to the Rose Bowl, while the rest of its schools were put on ice until the next season. While the rest of the country's best programs competed in the hugely popular bowl season, the PCC turned its back on millions of dollars and priceless exposure to make a dubious point about its attachment to the NCAA's version of amateurism.
The academics running the PCC demanded law and adherence to law and they did not care how hypocritical or preposterous they looked achieving it. While the Southern schools were playing football with a near-religious fervor, and doling out athletic scholarships two decades before the rest of the country followed suit, the West Coast universities were being throttled by a group of scholars who did not really understand what they were involved in.
All of their bravado and sanctimony would have been defensible if they'd had the courage to declare themselves the West Coast's Ivy League and de-emphasize the sport, but they tried to have it both ways. The PCC chose to compete at the most cutthroat level of football while posturing as though they did so from a morally and academically superior position. The athletic departments within the PCC were left to make the difficult choice: Comply and lose, or pretend to comply and play the real game behind the back of its own overseers.
To better understand how the league cracked up, it is important to understand the unusual way in which it first came together. The conference was chartered by just four universities—California-Berkeley, Washington, Oregon, and Oregon State—but had expanded over the next fifteen years to include Stanford, Washington State, Idaho, Montana, USC and UCLA. It was a quirky, volatile mixture of old and new universities, public and private institutions, major population centers and small rural communities, and it did not take long before the class hostilities, ideological differences, and resentments over disparities in value festered into toxic rivalries between league members.
Old-money Stanford and Cal, for example, had been slippery friends and serious rivals for the Bay Area's affections from time immemorial. But both shared an unshakable belief that they were the moral epicenter of the PCC and the league's crown jewels. In the early 1920s they'd joined forces to assail USC, a school they regarded as gaudy and new money, and the city of Los Angeles, which they openly despised. The Bay schools attacked Southern California for its relaxed academic standards and its “too-exuberant” embrace of football as a publicity vehicle.
The Bay Brothers found USC's enthusiasm so vulgar that they joined forces in the middle of the 1924 football season, just two years after they'd welcomed the Trojans to the PCC, to announce they were severing all future athletic relations. Their justification was that USC was competing with ineligible players and providing impermissible benefits to others. The Golden Bears and Indians announced, in embarrassingly pious tones, that it was in the best interest of not just the PCC, but all of intercollegiate athletics, that USC be banished to the wilderness.
Despite a litany of statements implying that the Trojans were beyond redemption, the Bay schools reversed course and agreed to resume normal relations following a series of secret meetings in San Francisco after the 1925 season. Despite the sudden reconciliation the Bay schools never treated USC with anything but condescension. That shared contempt, and USC's justifiable desire to punch back at its antagonists, would bubble to the surface multiple times over the ensuing decades.
Four-years later when UCLA, the nine-year-old Southern Branch of the University of California, joined the league, the Los Angeles schools found common ground in a culture war against the Northern California aristocrats. UCLA had been at first baffled, then indignant, that its sister school in Berkeley treated it like a mutant outgrowth. The so-called Cubs became intensely motivated to dominate the flagship Bears in athletics. While Cal and Stanford chastised the Los Angeles schools for their plebeian love of competition, behind the scenes the old patricians were doing everything they could to stay competitive, which included bending and breaking the PCC's sacrosanct rules.
But several decades down the road, as a consequence of economic and social factors, this bitter split was transformed into a California confederation, with a fifth ally to the north at the University of Washington in Seattle. The league's power centers had turned a hostile eye toward the smaller, rural universities of the north.
In an era before the big television contracts made up the preponderance of a school's revenue, stadium gates were the critical source of funding. The PCC's big-market schools absorbed major financial hits every time they played at the tiny stadiums in Corvallis, Eugene, and Portland, Oregon; Pullman, Washington; Helena, Montana, and Moscow, Idaho. The revenue from one game at the big stadiums in Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Berkeley, and Seattle, for example, could generate more cash for both programs than three trips to the tiny ballparks in the north. The fact that the smaller schools departed the big cities with half of the profits exacerbated the tensions.
The football powers were incensed that the small schools were able to successfully manipulate the pedantic, academically-obsessed leadership of the PCC into putting artificial caps onto their programs. They felt they were being prevented from recruiting freely, spending more to cover players' costs of attendance, and making independent decisions on eligibility standards, amongst other issues related to institutional autonomy, by what amounted to market manipulation by small-cap companies.
On top of the massive revenue imbalances, the national reputations of the big schools suffered under a widespread belief that they played weaker competition than other major programs around the country. As a consequence, USC and UCLA had begun floating the idea of football independence and playing national schedules to showcase their programs widely throughout the fall.
A line by the Los Angeles Times columnist Ed Hughes after USC beat the Oregon Agricultural College (Oregon State) in Portland back in 1926 encapsulated an important aspect of the hostilities:
“The Oregon Farmers can now attend to their milking and other chores and forget all about winning the Coast Conference championship and representing the West against the East at Pasadena on New Year’s Day."
The smaller schools suppressed their resentment of the leagues' titans, fearing, with a great deal of justification, that if they lost their membership in the PCC their athletic departments might disappear forever from the sport’s biggest stage. The relationship became like an unhappy marriage, with one side certain it could do better and the other side doubting that their partner was worth the abuse.
Everywhere you looked in the PCC there were borderline blood feuds and alliances somehow existing side by side. Northern California versus Southern California. Seattle vs the entire northern section of the conference. The freedom of private schools versus the restraints imposed on public institutions. Wealthy schools with big stadiums versus middle-class schools with small stadiums. National aspirations versus regional realities. But there was an overarching sense amongst the power players that the academics running the conference wanted to punish its athletically ambitious members rather than promote them. As the PCC rolled into the 1950s a super-cell event was building that would level the league and prove once again that the college-football marketplace was nearly impossible to regulate below its own preferred level.
The Storm Comes
The crisis began quietly enough in 1951 at the University of Oregon. The Webfoot’s coach, Fred Aiken, confessed to Commissioner V.O. Schmidt that he'd provided athletes with extra benefits, mainly cash, to play for him. It was a reckless decision, but he'd felt extreme pressure to keep pace with the powerful teams coming out of Seattle, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles.
Eugene, Oregon was a small town with a population of around 40,000. The football team played in front of 12,500 people in wooden bleachers at the track stadium. They competed in the media wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and had not been to a Rose Bowl since 1920. There were few high-level players in the state and Oregon could not promise an athlete the experience he'd get in the big city—so the school did what it had to do to compete with its conference rivals. It is a tale as old as college football.
"If you have to choose between breaking the rules and losing games, wouldn't it be better to break the rules?" Aiken once asked, rhetorically. "If you lose your games, you're certain to be fired. If you break the rules, you have to be caught before you're fired."
Aiken was out, but the league's coaches knew he'd been made an example of for a problem that had not been snuffed out. In fact, the pressure to do what Aiken had done was only increasing as the NCAA's early television contracts went into effect and the stakes for winning rose higher.
The PCC spent the next half decade making a public show of its integrity. The conference added the ostensible moral authority of its presidents and chancellors to the powers vested in the faculty representatives that ran the league. Their point man for the enforcement crackdown was Schmidt. But in January of 1956, with the Oregon fire mostly out, the league's Seattle outpost suddenly exploded.
Players at the University of Washington, unhappy with some allegedly physical discipline meted out by head coach John Cherberg, mutinied behind the encouragement of a potentially treacherous assistant. Cherberg, they said, had stomped on a player's foot before a game to make him angry enough to play, and slapped another player in the face during a home loss to UCLA.
Cherberg, in a kind of kamikaze move, went to the newspapers himself. Just one day after being fired he revealed the existence of a well organized alumni network that paid out cash and expansive extra benefits to players. Critically, Cherberg said the university was aware of the arrangement and allowed it to exist.
Multiple players denigrated Cherberg but confirmed the existence of the fund. It turned out to be mostly a cash account administered by an already-infamous booster known as Roscoe “Torchy” Torrance. The fund had allowed the Huskies to recruit not only in the happy hunting grounds of California, but also in Chicago, where they took players from the Big Ten and Notre Dame at a time when that kind of national recruiting almost did not exist.
The big joke, which should have sparked an earlier investigation, had landed at the 1937 Rose Bowl game, where Washington was playing the University of Pittsburgh (another program with a well-organized payroll). After the public-address man had read off Washington's starting lineup, listing Chicago as the hometown for seven Husky starters, a scribe in the press box had looked around in amazement and asked: "Who's coaching the team—Capone?"
The exposure of the Seattle slush fund had loosened lips around the conference. Within three months of the fiasco at Washington, multiple illicit funds were uncovered at UCLA, USC, and Cal, where ostensibly benevolent booster organizations were found operating in plain sight. Schmidt’s investigation was streamlined as one busted school helped expose the next in line.
It was the wife of a UCLA alumnus, for example, shortly after UCLA was caught connecting its athletes to local donor clubs, who'd turned in USC after discovering a bogus academic fund being used to pay athletes. USC's people followed up their bust by pointing investigators toward multiple booster fronts set up by Cal, including one operating in Los Angeles, that were using cash and benefits to lure athletes to the north.
What most disturbed the PCC's faculty representatives and executives was that in every case athletic administrators and coaches were the ones connecting athletes to the booster groups. It was a blackmarket payroll system and, in some cases, it appeared that several presidents and chancellors were at least partially aware of what was going on. These were not rogue boosters operating outside of the school's reach, these were organizations working in concert with the athletic departments to run big-time football operations. Furthermore, players and coaches clearly were being encouraged or coached to lie to and stonewall Commissioner Schmidt about their arrangements.
For the NCAA this was a monstrous scandal, the ugly black heart of everything the Association was built to blot out. But because the sport was policed locally by its faculties and commissioners, the investigations and punishments fell to the conferences themselves, a process the NCAA more or less certified at its annual meeting. This is where Commissioner Schmidt, in zealously prosecuting the scandal, cost himself his job, forever altered the role of league commissioners, and helped bring about the self immolation of the PCC.
Schmidt had made a serious error when he appointed Orlando Hollis, the dean at Oregon’s Law School, the faculty representative to oversee the investigations and punishments. Hollis was at the center of a group of smaller schools that openly disdained the league's heavyweights and fantasized about humbling them. Hollis had also an open contempt for the city of Los Angeles, which he referred to as a "cesspool," while implying its universities shared the same wallows.
The PCC dealt out swift and savage punishments to its most important programs, including multiple-season player suspensions at Washington, Cal, USC, and UCLA, including declaring entire classes of would-be seniors ineligible, ending their careers in summary fashion. While dealing out one and two-year Rose Bowl bans for Washington and USC, Hollis's group added a three-year Rose Bowl ban for the Bruins, one more than anyone else got, at a time when UCLA was dominating the conference, with three league titles over a five year stretch, including the 1954 national championship.
Asked about his prospects for the coming season, UCLA head coach Red Sanders said: "How do we look? Just like the situation at Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia Tech, Iowa or any other top university if you took away all their seniors."
When Hollis and his faculty clique, in consultation with Schmidt, had announced their litany of penalties, the conference began to set fire to itself rather than live under the current order. The newspapers in Los Angeles, where the realities of big-time football were well understood, inserted themselves into the fray, lambasting what they considered the backward administration of the league.
In one editorial the Times branded the conference chiefs: “The Floundering Fathers of the PCC."
In another they described the penalty process as “the posturing of intellectual giants who are suddenly feeling their muscles . . . . the acts of egg heads who were frustrated, thwarted, and diabolically envious of the fame achieved by football coaches and players, since their own search for personal acclaim has proven futile.”
Hollis was zeroed in on for sustained shelling, with newspapers calling Oregon the “University of Hollis,” and Hollis himself: “The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.” One editorial described the school as little more than “Orlando Hollis and his gay group of vestal virgins,” while yet another described him as an “Avenging Angel and well-known inventor of unworkable athletic codes.”
The same newspapers, with encouragement from the boosters of Los Angeles football, began advocating for UCLA and USC to join their academic and athletic peers in another league, or to go independent and play a national schedule. A related movement began for the four California schools to break away from the PCC and form their own league.
The situation deteriorated further when the big schools attempted to raise stipends for athletes, which was a good-faith effort to undercut one of the reasons for the slush funds. The proposal was defeated by the small schools who felt that athletes in major cities could get by on the stipends that worked in Eugene, Corvallis, Pullman, and Moscow. Bitter class conflicts, brass tacks economic realities, and feelings of pure malice toward conference partners were punching big holes in the league's sails.
With USC and UCLA on probation, and major penalties debilitating California and Washington, Oregon State and Oregon suddenly won back to back PCC titles in 1956 and 1957. The Beavers, who had made one Rose Bowl appearance in their entire history, were clobbered by a powerful Iowa team in Pasadena. The Webfoots, who had not been to Pasadena in 37 years, were knocked off by Ohio State in a close battle.
Those two campaigns solidified the big-school's paranoia that the league’s forgotten programs were desperate enough to cripple them with lawfare over booster practices that were common across the conference. The slush-fund scandals had begun at Hollis's University of Oregon, after all, a program that the big schools were now watching play in the Rose Bowl as they sat home in the stockades. The Los Angeles papers called it “the tyranny of the smaller schools," fueled by jealousy and resentment over a level of success that was beyond their reach on a consistent basis.
Throughout 1957 faculty representatives from the big schools applied pressure on Schmidt, sounding him out on his approach. According to NCAA Executive Director Byers, Schmidt would be called to the floor during conference meetings and asked questions "as Jesus had been by the Pharisees.”
A faculty representative would ask Schmidt if a coach purchasing a soda for a recruit during his visit was a problem. When Schmidt answered yes, by the NCAA and PCC's rules, that was a recruiting violation, he would be ridiculed as a simpleton. The incessant top-down pressure led to Schmidt’s resignation in December of 1957, six years after the first shock wave had gone down the West Coast.
The league's power players had reached an epiphany: The police work of a commissioner was indistinguishable from that of a professional saboteur. Scofflaws were no longer important to the PCC's power players, and bigger violations were something to be talked out in private, not in faculty meetings amongst jealous academics, or on the front page of newspapers distributed across the country.
Schmidt, who had been brought onboard in one era and forced down the plank in what was clearly another, left his post a bewildered man.
“They hired me to keep it clean,” a shellshocked Schmidt said to Byers.
Byers, who had monitored this twisted drama from the NCAA's Kansas City headquarters, saw Schmidt as a scapegoat. The PCC's athletic powers had changed tacks right under the noses of their stodgy presidents, chancellors, and faculty without bothering to let anybody know. The athletic side of the league believed it was doing business exactly like the other leagues and, rather than confront that problem at a national level, they decided to make an example of their local law enforcement and carry on.
Schmidt had no illusions about what was coming to fruition in major college football. At a meeting of the full NCAA Council he offered up his wisdom:
“We cannot cure a disease by treating its symptoms. We legislate against recruiting while allowing the pressures from winning to go unabated. We know it takes winning material to win games. We know the fate of the coach who fails. We are the guardians of a precarious balance between institutional idealism and practical college athletics."
Schmidt continued:
“Ethically and idealistically, colleges and universities cannot accept the professional. Practically and realistically, they are unwilling or unable to govern the pressures for the highly organized, competitive and winning athletics program that their public, their alumni and, perhaps in a lesser degree, their students demand.”
Later, after he had resigned, Schmidt penned an editorial that described the crippling conflict of interest that the commissioner labored under:
Under the code, he the commissioner will have the rather unenviable position of sitting as judge of those who employ him. He must preserve a judicial demeanor and temperament while those seeking his rulings, no matter how sincere they might be, are blinded by their own interests. His ruling in many cases disappoints the institution requesting his opinions.
His decisions will prove too literal, too narrow, too technical, too liberal, or too broad. He will, moreover, require an objectivity and perspective which he cannot expect from those against whom he may rule. There is nothing abnormal or uncommon in this result; it is the thinking of all mankind. It is motivated by self-interest.
In a general way, athletic conferences stayed in confederation as the colonies had in the early years of the United States. A collection of schools that existed in varying economic, social, and geographical conditions had to be shown strong common cause to stay bound together. In 1959 the PCC's power programs, after years of fruitless negotiations, announced that the conference had run out of common causes and forced the league's dissolution.
UCLA, USC, Cal, and Washington immediately announced the creation of the Athletic Association of Western Universities (AAWU). Stanford, a school that had used its own scholarship system to buy athletes but had evaded Hollis's hammer, would join the new association within a month. The schools made a point of not identifying themselves as a conference and, agreeing with Schmidt about the trouble with commissioners, decided not to hire one. Instead, they created a position they called the Association Executive, a kind of brand ambassador and deal maker working on behalf of the athletic departments. Without fully realizing it, the AAWU had created the prototype for the modern league commissioner.
They hired the legendary Tom J. Hamilton to fill the post. Hamilton had been a star halfback on the Naval Academy's 1926 national championship team and served as the executive officer on the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier during World War II. Hamilton had experience as a head-football coach at Navy and as an athletic director at Pittsburgh. Most importantly, he was well liked and his integrity was beyond reproach.
Most recently Hamilton had attempted to build the sport's first national affiliation, a concept dubbed the Airplane Conference because of its need for jet travel. His vision was coming to fruition when the Pentagon ordered the Army, Navy, and Air Force Academies to drop out due to other priorities, and the plan collapsed in its final stages. Each of the five West Coast powers had planned to join the new league before it broke down. Hamilton, looking for a new opportunity, went west.
Rather than a highly regulated league, the new association reverted to a much older model, allowing for Home Rule, what they called an “institutional application of rules," to determine how athletic departments were run. Strict faculty oversight was wiped out. In the most revealing stricture of the new order, all member schools were expected to adhere to a personal honor system when it came to violations of the NCAA's code. It was a radical experiment in trust from the remains of a league that was traumatized by industrial-scale duplicity. They were determined not to repeat their recent history—not by reforming themselves—but by choosing to stop looking for trouble.
The AAWU flexed its power immediately when it blocked Oregon, Oregon State, and Washington State from joining them. The move left no doubt that their participation was not necessary for the league's commercial or competitive success, and that their France-punishing-Germany after World War I-act during the PCC scandals had permanently poisoned their relationships. It was contempt and scorn that went down to the bone.
While the AAWU had not had time to work out a new a contract with the Rose Bowl and the Big Ten, the committee in Pasadena showed its hand when it invited Washington, the Association’s first champion, to represent the West in 1959. The Huskies clobbered the Wisconsin Badgers, 44-8, for their first Rose Bowl victory in five appearances.
The AAWU would blackball its old PCC antagonists until 1962, when Washington State was allowed to join the new club. After letting the Oregon schools beg for another two years, the Association relented in 1964, permitting both institutions to rejoin the cohort. It became a proper league once more and rebranded itself the Pacific Athletic Conference. Four years later, in 1968, the schools reconstituted as the Pac-8, claimed all of the old PCC records as their own, and moved forward with the radically different AAWU governing model.
Hamilton served as league executive until 1971 when he was replaced by Wiles Hallock, who reclaimed the title of conference commissioner. Hallock told Byers that during the transition with Hamilton the old Navy man had admitted to a moral ambivalence over his role at the top of the Association. Hamilton had known of multiple major NCAA violations amongst his programs, but because it was explicitly not his job to police the league he could only meet with schools behind the scenes and attempt to mediate a solution. Unlike his predecessor, Schmidt, Hamilton never made the conflicts public and the league maintained its high prestige during his tenure.
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