With fall officially here now, most Americans are happily immersed in their first love — football, at the college and professional levels, and in many states high school, as well.

For collegiate football fans on the west coast, however, the coming season will be bittersweet as the venerable Pac-12 conference — in which traditional powers USC, UCLA, Oregon, Washington and others have resided for generations — will be playing its final season before disbanding.

Talking heads in the mainstream media have advanced countless theories as to why and how this happened but, predictably, their analysis is a mile wide but only an inch deep, conveniently overlooking the true culprit.

Simply put, the Pac-12 is just the latest victim of liberal ideology and the government employee unions using someone else’s dues dollars to advance it.

If that seems a stretch, just follow the money.

The Pac-12 has long lagged behind the other so-called “Power 5” conferences in terms of its media rights deal and how much cash trickles down from the league to each member school because of it.

Each of the major conferences currently has a contract with a different television network, which bids for the exclusive right to broadcast its games. Obviously the value of the deal can vary widely depending on the number of anticipated viewers. The more eyes watching a game, the more its broadcast rights are worth.

The Pac-12, however, has no media deal beyond July 2024.

How can that be, when two of the conference’s signature members, USC and UCLA, are situated in the nation’s second-largest city?

For starters, the Pac-12 has remained a non-factor in two of college athletics’ most popular sports, football and basketball. The conference hasn’t produced a national champion in football since USC in 2003 and 2004 while no Pac-12 basketball team has even made the championship game since 2006.

Still, even losing teams have rabid fans. What’s made the Pac-12 so toxic is that its signature schools are located in Deep Blue states whose political climates — financed to a huge extent by unions in general and government employee unions in particular — are driving people away in droves.

A study by Laffer Associates of California’s demographic collapse, for example, shows the state has suffered a net loss of 450,000 residents and $30 billion in adjusted gross income in the past year alone, as residents flee the reign of terror imposed under the one-party rule of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the overwhelming Democrat majority in Sacramento.

High taxes, illegal immigration, homelessness, drugs and out-of-control crime have become the state’s hallmarks, and things are no better in neighboring Oregon and Washington.

Simply put, it isn’t the college sports programs that TV networks look at with alarm. It’s what’s happening in liberal enclaves like Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle.

While a state the size of California could conceivably absorb the out-migration of even 450,000 residents in one year, TV contracts aren’t renegotiated annually. A network can pay hundreds of millions to hold a conference’s broadcast rights for a decade or more.

That the Pac-12 currently finds itself with no suitors at all exposes the harsh truth that the smart money doesn’t consider the future of blue states worth the investment.

In addition to USC and UCLA in Los Angeles, the Pac-12 also included Cal and Stanford in the uber-leftist San Francisco market. To the north, Oregon and Oregon State are subject to the whims of Gov. Tina Kotek, while Washington and Washington State are the playthings of Gov. Jay Inslee.

Of the four schools remaining:

• Arizona (with traditional Pac 12 members Arizona and Arizona State) has a Democrat governor and a razor-thin two-seat GOP majority in its legislature; and,
• Colorado (whose only member is the University of Colorado) has a Democrat governor and a Democratic majority in the legislature.
• Only in Utah is there a Republican governor and legislative majority.

Would you bet billions of dollars on the prospects of states like these? The nation’s collective broadcast industry couldn’t and didn’t.

Amusingly, the most successful conference is the SEC, whose signature members are Alabama and Georgia. The Big 10 and Big 12, whose members come from the heartland states like Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Ohio, are likewise doing just fine.

The ACC, though, which has members dotted up and down the eastern seaboard, is struggling mightily.

See what’s going on here? The areas of the country where unions and liberal dogma have the least impact inspire the most confidence. Union strongholds on both coasts? Not so much.

The moral of the story couldn’t be more clear. When your favorite team suddenly finds itself consigned to permanent second-class status, blame bad liberal ideas and the unions whose corrupting influence on politics makes them possible.

And that’s true not just of football, but all of the country’s cherished institutions. That’s the chilling reality the Freedom Foundation confronts every day, and it’s a battle we don’t intend to lose.