Pacific Coast Conference

Pacific Coast Conference
PCC
Established	December 2, 1915
Dissolved	June 30, 1959
Association	NCAA
Members	9 (final), 10 (total)
Region	Pacific Coast, Mountain States
Locations

The Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) was a college athletic conference in the United States which existed from 1915 to 1959. Though the Pac-12 Conference claims the PCC's history as part of its own, with eight of the ten PCC members (including all four original PCC charter members) now in the Pac-12, the older league had a completely different charter and was disbanded in 1959 due to a major crisis and scandal. The name Pacific Coast Conference is now used by a San Diego area community college league established in 1982.^[1]

Established on December 2, 1915,^[2] its four charter members were the University of California (now University of California, Berkeley), the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, and Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University).

Conference members

• University of California, Berkeley (1915–1959)
• University of Oregon (1915–1959)
• Oregon State College (1915–1959)
• University of Washington (1915–1959)
• Washington State College (1917–1959)
• Stanford University (1918–1959)
• University of Idaho (1922–1959)
• University of Southern California (1922–1959, suspended in 1924)
• University of Montana (1924–1950)
• University of California, Los Angeles (1928–1959)

Membership timeline

 Full members 

Before the crisis

Rivalries between the Pacific Coast Conference schools grew beyond athletics, with animosities around educational, financial and state rivalries. The tensions between the California and Northwest schools extended to Edwin Pauley, a regent of the University of California, disliking the member universities in the Pacific Northwest enough to advocate that the California institutions leave the Pacific Coast Conference to form a "California Conference."

The PCC had a history of being very strict with regards to its standards; it suspended the University of Southern California from the conference in 1924, performed a critical self-study in 1932, and a voluminous two-million-word report was compiled by Edwin Atherton in 1939. The PCC had a paid commissioner, an elaborate constitution, a formal code of conduct, and a system for reporting student-athlete eligibility. Following the submission of his report, Atherton was promptly hired as commissioner in 1940,^[3] and served until his death four years later,^[4] He was succeeded by his assistant, Victor O. Schmidt.^[5]

The conference was wracked by scandal in 1951. Charges were made and confirmed that University of Oregon football coach Jim Aiken had violated the conference code for financial aid and athletic subsidies. After Aiken was compelled to resign, Oregon urged the PCC to look at similar abuses by UCLA football coach Red Sanders. The conference spent five years attempting to reform itself. In 1956, the scandal became public.

The crisis

The scandal first broke in Washington, when in January 1956, several discontented players staged a mutiny against their coach, John Cherberg. After the coach was fired, the PCC followed up on charges of a slush fund. The PCC found evidence of the prohibited activities of the Greater Washington Advertising Fund run by Roscoe C. "Torchy" Torrance, and in May imposed sanctions.

In March, allegations of prohibited payments made by two booster clubs associated with UCLA, the Bruin Bench and the Young Men's Club of Westwood, were published in Los Angeles newspapers. UCLA refused for ten weeks to allow PCC officials to proceed in their investigation. Finally, UCLA admitted that, "all members of the football coaching staff had, for several years, known of the unsanctioned payments to student athletes and had cooperated with the booster club members or officers, who actually administered the program by actually referring student athletes to them for such aid." The scandal thickened as a UCLA alumnus and member of the UCLA athletic advisory board blew the whistle on a secret fund for payments in violation of PCC rules to Southern California players, known as the Southern California Educational Foundation. This same alumnus also blew the whistle on Cal's phony work program for athletes known as the San Francisco Gridiron Club, with an extension in the Los Angeles area known as the South Seas Fund.

Aftershocks and disbandment

The first major reaction came from the University of California system. Robert Sproul, president of the University of California, along with the chancellors of Berkeley and UCLA, drafted a "Five Point Plan", emphasizing academic eligibility standards, setting the two UC campuses apart from the PCC and laying the groundwork for their departure. For Sproul the PCC dispute was not just about athletics; at stake was the ideal of a unified University of California that enjoyed statewide support. This ideal collided with aspirations of UCLA alumni who believed that Sproul's vision would always favor the Berkeley campus at the expense of the younger UCLA campus.

Oregon State College president August Leroy Strand wrote, "The reasons for California and UCLA dropping out are as different as night and day... the significance of the whole affair was the union of Berkeley and UCLA... admissions and scholarship had nothing to do with the withdrawals . . . the marriage of this desire on the part of Berkeley with the known ambitions and necessities of its sister institution has produced a bastard that has the bard of a purebred but the innards and hair of a mongrel."

The PCC was falling apart, leading to the decision to dissolve after the 1958-59 season.

Conference champions

The official record book of conference champions was compiled by the then acting commissioner Bernie Hammerbeck in 1959.^[6]

Commissioners

• Herb Dana, 193x–1940
• Edwin N. Atherton, 1940–1944
• Victor O. Schmidt, 1944–1959
• Bernie Hammerbeck (acting), 1959

See also

• List of defunct college football conferences
• California Intercollegiate Baseball Association

References

• Games Colleges Play : Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics, The Johns Hopkins University Press 1996, ISBN 0-8018-4716-8