You could have just titled this thread
"Hey, haters and trolls from back east! Stop in here to bash the Pac-12!"
So here's the one comment that won't fit in that category:
Arizona was thin this year because recruits bailed out due to the FBI investigation and thinking Sean Miller would be gone. (He will be soon, but he coached this season.) UCLA cratered because they had poor team chemistry and Alford lost the team (and his job).
Pac-12 basketball with Arizona and UCLA being bad in the same season -- as an ACC fan, you can think of ACC football with Clemson and Florida State being bad in the same season and you get
Wake Forest winning the ACC. It will get better when Arizona and UCLA hire good coaches who don't have the FBI on their tail, just as ACC football got better reviews from the media when Clemson and Florida State got better.
Just on the Pac-12/WCC comparison:
-- Gonzaga is way ahead of every other team in both conferences.
-- So, big gap between Gonzaga and the second level, which IMO is Washington, Oregon, Saint Mary's, and Arizona State in that order. Reverse Washington and Oregon based on recent results, but not on the season as a whole. The selection committee doesn't pretend that December and January never happened.
-- After that: The next level in the Pac-12 this year (Colorado/Utah/Oregon State/UCLA/Arizona) was better than the next level in the WCC (BYU/USF/Loyola/USD), but not close to NCAA tournament quality. The bottom of both leagues was pretty bad. Of course the bottom of every league is usually pretty bad, it's just that a bad team's computer rating looks better when they get crushed by Duke than when they get crushed by Arizona State.