Ted Miller has some things to say about the end of the Pac-12

On the end of the Pac-12 Blog, the conspiracy against USC and why Washington/Oregon is the right way for things to go out.

I’ve wondered what Ted Miller would think about all of this. 

About the No. 5 Ducks playing the No. 3 Huskies in the Pac-12 championship game. 

About this being the last Pac-12 championship game, the change of the sport he covered for three decades and a media industry that brought himself abrupt change back in 2017. 

Miller, the longtime college football writer for the Seattle PI and ESPN.com, was the Pac-12 to me. As I traveled to media day and the conference championship and the College Football Playoff as a wide-eyed 25-year-old during Oregon’s last run like this, I rarely saw a table where Miller wasn’t dressed the best, telling the most stories and laughing the loudest. He owned every room. 

And for years, his work with ESPN’s Pac-12 Blog provided West Coast fans with the type of comprehensive and modern coverage they deserved, the type that’s rarely been replicated since ESPN pulled the plug back in 2017.

Miller’s been out of the game since. He’s shocked by how little football he watches these days. But you better believe he has some thoughts on the end of this era.

Here’s a conversation with Ted Miller.

(Lightly edited for length and clarity.)

How long were you in Seattle for? 

I moved there in ’99 and was there through 2008. I basically jumped in right as Neuheisel came in, and I thought I was escaping scandal because I had been covering Auburn and the Terry Bowden to Tommy Tuberville debacle. I figured now I’m in the Pac-10 and this will be nice and peaceful. New coach. Million dollar coach. It would all be fine. 

What did it feel like becoming a West Coast guy after growing up in the Southeast? 

Two things marked my beginning.

One of my early first-year stories was I was reviewing the records of Mike Bellotti at Oregon, and I hadn’t really known his accomplishment levels and Oregon’s rise. So I wrote this fawning story about Mike Bellotti for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Immediately a huge Washington booster sent me a note saying: Hello. Welcome to Seattle. I think I need to explain a few things to you.  

Then it went on to say how I need to learn to hate Oregon and that I was going to get dragged for at least six to eight months for this — it became a whole lot, but people got over it. 

My second Pac-12 story was that Washington was playing Miami early in the season and I still had my SEC bias. I was a Georgia season ticket holder and I was just sitting there thinking that Miami was just going to beat the crap out of Washington. It was 2000. I had covered the team in 1999. I thought they were OK, but it was like, Miami. 

So I called a buddy up and said I wanted to put some money on the game. Miami was only favored by four. It was going to be easy. Then I caught myself. I said to myself, I can’t be betting money on college football as a sports writer. That just seems unethical. I had never thought of doing it before and I’m so glad I didn’t, because Washington beat the crap out of them. They scored some late touchdowns and were doing some fluffy stuff at the end, but for most of that game Washington was up two touchdowns and just dominating the line of scrimmage. I remember thinking to myself, “All my buddies in the southeast, they think that this is soft out here. But this is a rugged football team.” And the thing is, that Washington team wasn’t really incredibly talented, they were just a bunch of dirty, hard-nosed, grumpy players. A lot of the Oregon players were like that too. And it kind of transformed me into being the advocate for the West Coast, even if it wasn’t my home territory. 

When we were talking earlier you had mentioned that going to ESPN and joining the blogging world wasn’t exactly your cup of tea, but so many people remember you specifically for your work during that era. How do you view that time in retrospect?

I loved the irreverence of it, and I really tried to provide good information for people. What I didn't like was the continuous updating. I’d be out with my wife on my anniversary and they’d be calling me because the AP has a story about Matt Barkley injuring his ankle in Los Angeles. I’m at dinner in Scottsdale and they want me to verify the story — I said the AP had it, but they wanted us to write our own thing for everything. And it was a famous ESPN thing, a lot of ESPN people didn’t break stories but they claimed them. They hated the fact that I would never do that. If someone else reported a story first, I would credit them in the second paragraph at the latest. And when they would take it out, I’d go and edit it back in. I had continual conflicts about stuff like that. 

The initial motto at ESPN was "feed the beast," which meant to write as much as you possibly could. But that was not my style. I was a columnist when I left Seattle and I was writing three columns a week and I worked really hard to make them good columns. So I was more into quality over quantity, and then I got into a quantity job and it was tough. It’s weird to me that so many people identified with that and liked that, because it was really hard for me to adjust to. It’s not what I wanted to do and I thought when I went there it would be a short term thing. And then it just becomes its own thing because the blogs were so successful. 

I was going to say, this all coincided with a time when the Pac-12 had a certain future.

There's so much in college football. We used to go out to dinners on Friday nights before games with the crew — ESPN guys, TV guys and national writers from different places. We would sit down, gossip, talk, argue, and bitch and moan about who was a good guy. Who was a cheat. Who is this. Who is that. 

And one of the biggest stories in college football that's never really been covered is what I think was basically a conspiracy to take down USC.

USC was so good, and their NCAA thing was the worst case in NCAA history. You had Alabama getting less restrictions when it was straight-up pay to come play for us. 

I remember telling the story a couple of times at ESPN, like mailbag-type stuff, I had an SEC AD, who will continue to not be named, straight up tell me it was a takedown because they thought USC cheated by being so cool with having Snoop Dogg and Will Ferrell and all those guys hanging out at practice and selling the L.A. lifestyle and all that stuff. So, they needed to be shut down, and they were. Meanwhile, schools were just blatantly paying players all across the SEC and they never get busted. It was funny because we would all laugh about it. Some schools just never did anything, like Stanford didn’t cheat. David Shaw didn’t cheat. It was an interesting dynamic.

Do you miss it?

My life is so much better now. I’m working for a family business. We’re doing really well. I have a five day work week and I’ve never really had that. Sports writers don’t understand how hard they work until they do a normal job. Like, you’re seven-day-a-week stuff. You’re at the game on Saturday, you’re writing follow ups on Sunday and then you’re just crunching on Monday to get ready for the next game. If you have kids, that means no sports and working at night. I work an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. job. Normal work hours. Weekends off. Predictable stress points. 

I don’t miss it much. 

People ask me about sports all the time. I don’t keep up with it like I used to. I watched the whole Washington/Oregon game this year and I watched the whole Ohio State/Michigan game this year.

Washington/Oregon was a gift from the gods. It was such a fantastically played football game regardless of who won.

I don’t think I’ve watched an entire football game other than those two. I just don’t really miss it that much. That probably tells me doing it for 25 years was enough. 

Did you imagine you’d be this happy?

On an ego level I was really angry about how it ended at ESPN. I didn’t see it coming. I was completely blindsided. I didn’t get it. I just signed a new contract like a month before I got let go and it was embarrassing. I had never had a significant setback in my journalism career. It had always been a steady move up. And when it happened I was embarrassed and hurt, but I had a year and a half that ESPN was going to pay me and I got to chill out and try and figure out that next direction. 

I told my wife — we had two young kids — that I wasn’t going to take a pay cut. The journalism world was struggling and the things that were available to me sounded kind of cool but the pay wasn’t what I needed. I just said to myself, “I can do something else.” My brother, who is the CEO of our company, and I had some conversations and he’s been recruiting me for a while just joking around, but then all of a sudden I just realized that this is a great opportunity to work with my brother and to have some financial security at a higher level. It just worked out great. We have a great company based out of Atlanta, Miller Zell. We’re doing a lot of work at SMU with its campus and sports facilities and I’ve at least been on the outside with that helping out here and there. 

It’s a good life. I wish it had ended differently because I’m a bitter guy and I’ll think about it and be mad at various people and wonder what actually happened. But since then my life has been significantly better. 

If you were writing a column this week to coincide with the Pac-12 championship game and the end of all of this, what notes do you think you would hit? 

Oh dude, this almost makes me sad to not be there. We know what this game is. Shit. It’s Oregon/Washington. It really is the best Pac-12 rivalry. I remember being at Husky Stadium and feeling an SEC-level of hate. 

It’s so awesome. I’d be going through the history of the rivalry. All of the craziness from the Wheaton play that was endlessly played at Autzen. I walked around Eugene one year when I worked at the PI dressed in purple and wearing a Husky foam hat — you can Google that story — and it was so much fun. [Oregon AD] Bill Moos came up to me going, “Oh my God. What are you doing, Miller?” You know. That type of stuff. 

The ADs were into it. The players were into it. If it has to go out, it’s the best possible scenario. Obviously one of the two is going to walk out happy, but of course the two are now tied together in the Big Ten. That’s going to be completely weird. I can’t believe it’s happening.

I wish I were in Vegas, I’ll say that. 

— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor