Last July in Hollywood, the Pac-12 Conference announced it was performing a reboot of football officiating.

This was the conference’s “Media Day” and embattled commissioner Larry Scott took the stage at a ballroom at the Loews Hotel, speaking with a teleprompter, where he announced after an extensive third-party review that the conference was making some changes.

No longer would Woodie Dixon act as the Pac-12 supervisor of football. It was determined Dixon was unqualified. Also, not trusted after he apparently called into the conference’s command center from home and overruled the instant-replay officials on duty during the WSU-USC game.

Dixon was being removed from the equation. From now on, the commissioner announced, David Coleman, the Pac-12 head of officiating, would answer to Scott himself. Creating some distance between the guy who caused a massive erosion of trust (Dixon) and the person most responsible for the officiating (Coleman) sounded like a great idea.

I turned and scanned the room for Dixon.

He was sitting at the back of the room -- immediately beside Coleman.

Hold that thought.

The Pac-12 Conference had another bad moment on Saturday night. The officials working the WSU-Cal game threw a flag after the Cougars returned a kickoff to midfield. The officials huddled and determined that No. 15 was guilty of “illegal hands to the face.” They subsequently marched the 15-yard penalty off from the spot of the foul, against WSU.

Then, a play ran.

Then, the referee announced the crew had penalized the wrong team. Instead of WSU having the ball at its own 8-yard line, the Cougars’ offense should have been starting from the Golden Bears’ 35. It was a 57-yard error and given that WSU drove for a field goal and not a touchdown, interested parties are now wondering how that error affected the game.

The Pac-12 announced on Sunday that its officials had made “an error of mechanics.” It suspended the referee one game and downgraded the entire crew that worked the game.

The temptation today is going to be to pin this one on Coleman, too. After all, he’s in charge of officiating. But I’ve felt for weeks that Pac-12 leadership was setting the head of officiating up for a fall at the end of this season. Two weeks ago, in Los Angeles, I asked Scott why the conference hadn’t publicly acknowledged any mistakes in any of the 34 head-to-head conference games played to that point.

Anyone watching the games knows the officiating hasn’t appeared any better than in prior seasons. The promise of “transparency” and accountability felt hollow. Were we really being led to believe the officiating had been stellar to that point?

The commissioner said: “I can tell you there are a significant number of mistakes every week.”

Scott then pointed at Coleman as the person with sole responsibility for determining whether a public statement on an officiating mistake should be triggered.

It’s a sloppy mess, isn’t it?

Three things:

♦ If you’re a Pac-12 fan, you have to be nauseated that the conversation on a Monday in November is again about officiating. The other Power Five Conferences are focused on jockeying for a College Football Playoff berth. The Pac-12 is busy embarrassing itself with another officiating error. One that has already been pinned on an individual referee instead of the noted systemic problems (lack of training, unqualified oversight) that fostered it.

♦ If you’re weary with Scott’s act, you have to be wondering how much longer the Pac-12 is stuck with him as commissioner. There’s been healthy turnover in the Pac-12 CEO Group -- the university presidents and chancellors. While Scott was exactly what the conference needed a decade ago, his bosses know the landscape has massively shifted. The Pac-12 is light years behind its peers in revenue and result. Scott makes $5.3 million annually. His contract is up in 2022. He’s spent a lot of time talking about the conference’s media right’s deal, up in 2024. If Scott is great at anything, it’s self preservation. He’s lined those events up nicely, hasn’t he?

♦ If you’re WSU, you have to be wondering if the conference values you as a member. That’s the saddest part of this. There’s long been a perception that the Pac-12 wants and needs its brand-name football programs to be successful. WSU isn’t USC or Oregon or Stanford. Even last season, when it won 10 games, the Cougars didn’t get adequate public support from the conference when jockeying for a New Year’s Six bowl game. Athletic director Pat Chun went public on his own, decrying the perception issue the conference has, while the conference that created that perception problem mostly sat back.

None of this is positive for the Pac-12. The conversation today should be about Utah and Oregon and a line of exciting games ahead this weekend. But another bad officiating weekend has derailed that discussion. Further, when the conference issued its statement about the error, it got the date of the game wrong in the release. Small thing. But it’s sloppy and little things matter when you’re trying to rebuild trust.

What does the Pac-12 do really well?

Ask yourself that. Not football. Not officiating. Not broadcasting or promoting its product. Or serving its fans. The Pac-12 doesn’t generate revenue on par with its peers. And its commissioner isn’t leading.

The Pac-12 declared itself a “media company" but it’s not any good at that, either. The Pac-12 Network is a shell network with no audience. Four of the five conference football games this next Saturday will kick off at 4:30 p.m. or later -- including Utah (5p) and Oregon (7:30p), where most of the country won’t see them.

Feels like a total reboot is in order.

Last July, in Hollywood, when Scott announced that Dixon was no longer the football supervisor, the room exhaled. Dixon was never qualified to oversee football. It was a misfire by Scott to appoint him in the first place. But the fact that Dixon was still sitting beside Coleman, especially during that announcement, was horribly bad optics for a conference that can’t even get little things right.

It’s just a symptom of a much larger issue of leadership. One that was underscored for the umpteenth time when an official marched off a penalty the wrong way.

This conference has been going the wrong way for a long time.