NBA great Bill Walton, center, takes a tour with Pac-12 men's college basketball players during an event in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2015.
Welcome to the most dreadful Pac-12 basketball season in conference history, where one coach has already been fired and several other seats are getting warm.
We're only one week into the conference schedule, but this much is certain: Unless someone goes on one hell of a run between now and March, the Pac-12 will be a one-bid league come tournament time.
So what's the point of even paying attention before the conference tournament in Las Vegas?
There is but one reason, and his name is Bill Walton.
The man is national treasure, and he is the only thing Pac-12 basketball has going for it right now.
We're talking about a man who once found a way to squeeze a reference to Larry Craig's "wide stance" into a college basketball broadcast, while also touching on Jay-Z's connection to UW and a U.S. government campaign that paid Woodie Guthrie to promote hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest.
This is, of course, the beauty of Bill Walton.
Rather than waste his, or our, time describing the middling basketball in front of him, Walton uses his platform to perform a relentless troll job while simultaneously extolling the virtues of the American west and the conference he holds dear. In a season where the product on the court is historically awful, it's exactly what the Pac-12 needs.
Who really wants to hear Walton tick through an established list of UCLA basketball coaching candidates anyway? Certainly not when we can listen to him shamelessly pimp Barack Obama for the job instead.
We're here for the absurd, not the insight.
Jerry Garcia and the Dead: Walton will inevitably bring up a Grateful Dead concert he attended — either recently, or in his hazy past — as an extremely labored metaphor for the action or setting of the particular game he is attending. It rarely, if ever, makes sense.
The four worst: Any particularly ugly sequence of action will be declared "one of the four worst plays in the history of (insert school here) basketball." Usually the play is terrible, but not quite as terrible as Walton might have you believe.
The theory of everything: If Walton is doing a game with ESPN play-by-play man Dave Pasch — whose name he always pretends to not remember — he will find a way to advance the theory of evolution as means of trolling Pasch's creationist background.
Geography lesson: There will be multiple references to geographical landmarks located in the state where the game is being played… in addition to everywhere else.
COC: Walton will utter the phrase "Conference of Champions" somewhere between 52 and 2,362 times during a given Pac-12 game. He will also emphasize "there are no truck stops here," even though Pullman, Wash., and Corvallis, Ore., very clearly reside in the conference.
Bracket buster: ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi will be the target of Walton's ire at least once, with Walton invariably insisting the Pac-12 should send between six and nine teams to the NCAA tournament. Divide that number by two and you will likely have an idea of how many tournament teams the conference actually has. Of course, this year, you might have to divide by six.
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