46 ForOregonState.org/Stater 2000: OSU is part of a threeway tie for the Pac-10 football championship. Beavers beat Notre Dame 41-9 in the Jan. 1, 2001, Fiesta Bowl. 2015: OSU wins the Pac-12 women’s basketball championship, the first of three in a row for the Beavers. In 2016, OSU also wins the conference tournament. 2018: OSU wins its third NCAA Division I Baseball National Championship, defeating Arkansas in the 2018 College World Series. THE CONFERENCE BREAKS APART By 1957, the four California schools and big-city Washington were making noises about forming their own conference, one run without interference from faculty representatives. In December 1957, PCC Commissioner Victor Schmidt — charged with enforcing the harsh penalties the faculty athletic representatives had levied — resigned under fire. Not long after that, President Strand wrote UW President Henry Schmitz, acknowledging the differences between Oregon State and Washington in size and setting, but noting that as a founding member of the conference, Oregon State had a right to be heard. Strand’s letter (provided by former University of Idaho archivist Ben Camp) sounds as if it could have been written in the past year: “The conference was formed, like all other such organizations, on a geographic basis and the intervening years have not changed that strong factor in bringing the institutions together,” he wrote. “Air travel has greatly extended the range of football teams, but basketball, baseball, track, swimming, tennis and golf are still beholden to geographic limitations. All of these sports, which are minor to football, are important to our athletic programs and any disruption to them will be seriously felt by all our institutions …. In the long run, don’t your fortunes lie with your friends in the north?” Other animosities were also at play within the conference. In Games Colleges Play, author John Thelin writes that in the last decade of the PCC, “intercollegiate football became the vehicle that drove other political agendas in higher education, including power struggles within the University of California (between Cal and UCLA), keen campus rivalries within the city of Los Angeles, and pride that pitted California against the states of Oregon and Washington.” The schisms had grown too large, and on Aug. 10, 1958, in Portland — where Oregon State,Oregon,Washington and California had formed the conference in 1915 — the PCC unanimously voted to dissolve after the 1958–59 season. Almost immediately, USC, UCLA, California and Washington formed the Athletic Association of Western Universities, which Stanford joined soon thereafter. (Rumor had it, Oregon State was to be invited as well. See “When one wouldn’t leave the other,” for more about how the Oregon schools ended up sticking together.) Members of the new AAWU declined a strong central authority. In lieu of the oversight they so disliked, they would be expected to adhere to a sort of honor code when it came to NCAA regulations. Glenn Seaborg, the UC chancellor, summed up the new process in Sports Illustrated: “If a member institution has reason to believe that another is violating either the letter or spirit of [the new rules], it may undertake to resolve the differences by discussion with that institution … You might say a man-to-man challenge.” The changes left Oregon State, which had won or shared the last two PCC football titles, without a conference. Competing as an independent in the early 1960s, the Beavers experienced one of the golden eras in the university’s athletic history, highlighted by Terry Baker’s 1962 Heisman Trophy and a Liberty Bowl victory; men’s basketball’s three NCAA tournament appearances and spot in the 1963 Final Four; the 1961 NCAA cross country championship; and baseball finishing in the national rankings in 1962 and 1963. In 1962, Washington State was invited to join the AAWU, but OSU and Oregon were still on the outside. On March 31, 1964, the announcement came that the Beavers and Ducks would rejoin their former conference mates that summer and be eligible for the Rose Bowl beginning that fall. Indeed, the Beavers took the 1964 AAWU crown and earned a berth in the 1965 Rose Bowl. “ANY ATTEMPT TO DRIVE A WEDGE BETWEEN OREGON STATE COLLEGE AND THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON WOULD ONLY HURT US BOTH.”
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