Imagine UCLA wins this afternoon vs. Colorado.
Imagine on the last weekend, Arizona — with the longest current win streak in the conference — beats the SoCal schools, while they both win in Tempe.
Further imagine the mountain teams sweep the Washingtons. Also, Oregon St. loses to Stanford but beats Cal.
Then you’ve got a 5-way tie at 12-6 behind Stanford at 15-3.
In case of a more-than-two-way tie, the first tiebreaker is record among the tied teams. The beneficiaries in that case are Oregon St. and UCLA — Beavers and Bruins both 5-3 among the tied teams (with a combined 3-1 vs. Utah).
OSU 5-3
UCLA 5-3
USC 4-4
UT 4-4
COL 2-6
The second tiebreaker is: Record vs. common opponents highest in the standings. Oregon St. was 0-2 vs. Stanford, UCLA 0-1.
The next step in tiebreaking procedure is unfathomable. Here’s the rule for determining which opponent to consider next (USC or Utah):
When arriving at another group of tied teams while comparing records, use each team’s record (won-lost percentage) against the collective tied teams common opponents as a group (prior to that group’s own tie-breaking procedure), rather than the performance against individual tied teams common opponents.
I have no idea what that means. Rather than unpack that, I’ll break the Utah-USC tie with the 2nd tiebreaker, which favors USC because they beat Stanford once. UCLA and Oregon State are both 1-1 against USC. Oregon St. wins the next tiebreaker for beating Utah twice.
Then the #4 seed goes to the second tiebreaker between USC and Utah. In that case, Utah is screwed by not getting a shot against Stanford in Palo Alto, because USC is 1-1 vs. Stanford, while Utah is 0-1.
If everything goes as imagined here, the tournament seeding would be:
1 Stanford
2 Oregon St.
3 UCLA
4 USC
5 Utah
6 Colorado
7 Arizona
8 Cal
9 Washington St.
10 Washington
11 Arizona St.
12 Oregon