During fall Saturdays last year, Pac-12 official John Morton would gaze up at the stands, the sights and the sun and feel something else wash over him during the conference’s impending demise.
Sentimentality. Melancholy. A sense of loss.
The CPA from the Pacific Northwest had spent 13 years as a Pac-12 on-field official. The 2023 season was his last in the league, mostly because it was the end of the league. It wasn’t easy having that fact play over in his mind and on the field for the entire season.
Officials are supposed to be neutral. Morton couldn’t be. Not in this case. He and his peers were rooting for status quo.
They weren’t alone.
“You knew that very well could be the last time you ever went to that stadium,” said Morton, a veteran back judge originally from Olympia, Washington, now currently living in Dallas. “You knew all these teams were going to be in other places next year. Officials were going to be in other conferences. It was unlike anything else. It definitely made for a much different season.”
Amid the Pac-12’s dissolution, it’s easy to overlook a cohort of individuals who proudly carry with them some of the conference’s lasting legacies. The 64 Pac-12 officials who worked last season have been scattered to the winds of fate but not without memories, emotion and goodbyes.
“It was a very unceremonious end,” Morton told CBS Sports. “There were people with a lot of runway left in front of them. Good officials. But the numbers are going to be such that not everybody is going to have a chair when the music stops.”
Those 64 on-field officials (not counting replay officials) were divided into eight crews of eight for the league’s last season. The story from there is almost Darwinian. Natural selection with a whistle. Only…
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