The world according to Jim:

• On the first full day of the 2025 college football season, it must be asked once again: Did USC and UCLA horribly miscalculate in the summer of 2022, when both decided to leave the Pacific-12 (and, in effect, began the exodus that turned a Power Five conference into one of the Others)?

Or maybe we should rephrase that. …

• The late Jesse Unruh, during his days as the all-powerful speaker of the California state assembly in the 1960s, once was quoted as saying, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” That’s still true, but the quotation could equally apply to college athletics, especially in the NIL era, where big-time athletic departments’ chase for dollars is insatiable and the money gets spent about as fast as it comes in.

Given that calculation, the

See Full Page