Ducks are flying high, but other former Pac-12 teams are off to rocky Big Ten start

Oregon has made a splash in its first Big Ten season but the other former Pac-12 teams are finding the transition far more difficult.

UCLA, USC and Washington are all sitting in the bottom half of their new conference’s standings midway through the season and are collectively 4-10 in Big Ten play.

The Trojans and the Bruins, who were the first Pac-12 teams to announce they were leaving the conference before it fell apart in realignment in the summer of 2023, have just one Big Ten win apiece this season.

USC (3-4, 1-4) has dropped three straight, including last Saturday’s 29-28 loss at Maryland. The Trojans have led in the fourth quarter of all seven of their games this season.

“We’ve had a myriad of different issues,” coach Lincoln Riley said this week. “I think the reality is we’ve been in a lot of really close games, we’ve had some opportunities to separate in several of these games and we haven’t. We’ve had some opportunities to close them. We’ve had some unfortunate breaks, we’ll call them, in several of these games, but we haven’t been good enough to overcome those.”

The Trojans, who opened the season with a win against LSU in Las Vegas and were ranked as high as No. 11 earlier in the season, have a chance to get back on track at home against Rutgers on Friday night.

Overall, the Big Ten’s teams are 5-11 when traveling over multiple time zones. Collectively, USC, UCLA and Washington have just one conference win on the road.

The Huskies (4-3, 2-2) will play at No. 13 Indiana on Saturday in their second road game played at 9 a.m. back home.

Washington won the Pac-12 championship and went on to play in the national championship game last season but subsequent turnover meant this was essentially a rebuilding year for the Huskies. Coach Jedd Fisch, in his first year with the Huskies, knew there would be highs and lows.

“There are so many new faces, new bodies, new people playing positions they’ve never played before, in atmospheres they’ve never played, in a conference we’ve never played in. There was going to be so much new that it was going to be impossible to suggest that it was going to look too different than it is right now,” Fisch said.

UCLA (2-5, 1-4) snapped a five-game losing streak with a 35-32 victory at Rutgers last weekend, for the Bruins’ first win in the new conference.

“I’m excited to get a Big Ten win but we have a few more games and I would like to become bowl eligible,” Bruins coach DeShaun Foster said. “So we’re just going to continue to play and hopefully we get there.”

Interestingly, Oregon State and Washington State, the lone two remaining teams in the Pac-12 after realignment, have both defeated Big Ten opponents this season. The Beavers beat Purdue and the Cougars beat Washington.

The outlier for the Pac-12-to-Big Ten teams is the Ducks, ranked No. 1 in the nation for the first time since 2012, and boosted by a victory two weeks ago at home over then-No. 2 Ohio State.

“Entering this conference, there’s some new challenges that are presented. Going through the summer scouting reports, you realize that some of these teams that we are going to get to play, and it’s really exciting. But I’ll tell you here at Oregon, we chase and attack those challenges,” Dan Lanning predicted before the season kicked off.

Oregon (7-0, 4-0) got off to a shaky start in lackluster nonconference wins against Idaho and Boise State that now seem like anomalies. Last weekend on the road the Ducks shutout the Boilermakers 35-0. This week they host No. 20 Illinois.

It’s likely Oregon will figure into the expanded College Football Playoffs field barring disaster.

“You don’t sit halfway through a meal and say you’re done eating when there’s still a lot of food left on the plate. That’s where we’re at; we’re at the midpoint of the season. We’re not done yet,” Lanning said on Monday. “There’s a lot of things that we still want to accomplish. So (the ranking) doesn’t really matter for us.”

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