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A few wins in the NCAA Tournament doesn't necessarily erase roughly two years of embarrassments and frustrations for any conference.
For the Pac-12, though, the past few days have granted a momentary reprieve for a conference that has absorbed one bad headline after another pretty much since the news first broke in late September 2017 that four Division I assistant basketball coaches — including USC's Tony Bland and Arizona's Book Richardson — had been arrested by the FBI on various fraud and corruption charges.
Since then, the tent pole sports of football and men's basketball have struggled so thoroughly in the Pac-12 it was easy to coax snickers when referring to the league as one of the nation's power conferences.