My two cents: Attendance sagging in Pac-12 football and hoops, and it's sad

Is the Pac-12 a football league?

Through games of Nov. 4, the Pac-12 averaged roughly 9,000 empty seats per home game. Sad.

Is the Pac-12 a basketball league?

In Friday’s openers, Oregon drew 7,232 fans coming off a Final Four season, leaving 5,000 empty seats at Matthew Knight Arena.

USC, ranked No. 10, its highest first-week ranking since 1971, drew 6,327 at Galen Center, leaving 4,000 empty seats.

Filling all those seats, in football and basketball, is more of a problem than ever. The one known change is that TV executives now determine when and at what time games are played.

So attendance plunges.

Does it really matter? Given the league’s $3.1 billion media rights contract, the schools are paying unprecedented salaries to coaches and administrators, and building sports facilities that are monuments to excess.

The Pac-12 bills itself as “The Conference of Champions,” but in reality it is becoming “The League That Fans Forgot.”