Pac-12 Adds Four Teams, Staves Off Extinction

It turns out reports of the Pac-12’s demise were greatly exaggerated.

Thanks to the recent inclusion of four new members, the conference has been upgraded from critical condition but requires additional athletic blood to become stable.

What does the future of the Pac-12 look like now?

As currently constituted, the Pac-12 comprises Oregon State University and Washington State University. Gone are marquee programs such as the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California (USC), and the universities of Oregon and Washington, which all bolted for the Big Ten.

Around the same time, former Pac-12 members Arizona State University and the universities of Arizona, Colorado, and Utah joined the Big 12.

Over the past couple of years, “Power 5” schools have been swapping conferences in search of bigger and better media deals.

Yet the athletic musical chairs hasn’t been a zero-sum game. Several conferences gained members, while one, the Pac-12 — the famed “Conference of Champions” — was decimated.

But now the Pac-12 is rising from the ashes, just not in Phoenix. Beginning July 1, 2026, the conference will add Boise State University, Colorado State University, Fresno State University, and San Diego State University.

“For over a century, the Pac-12 Conference has been recognized as a leading brand in intercollegiate athletics,” Commissioner Teresa Gould said in a release. “We will continue to pursue bold cutting-edge opportunities for growth and progress, to best serve our member institutions and student-athletes.”

With four new members, the Pac-12 will officially be halfway back to its former self, though in number only and still shy of the eight members the NCAA requires for conferences to remain legitimate.

When the other members jettisoned the conference, the NCAA granted the Pac-12 a two-year waiver, allowing Washington State and Oregon State to operate as a two-team “conference” while trying to secure a viable future.

Meanwhile, the two schools are competing against opponents in the Mountain West, the conference the four new teams joining the Pac-12 are leaving.

Why don’t they leave sooner and reconstitute the Pac-12 starting next season? For the same reason all these decisions are made: money. As ESPN explains, schools departing the Mountain West owe the conference an $18 million “exit fee” if they provide a two-year notice. That doubles if the notice is one year.

Plus, the statute of limitations on the NCAA waiver extends for another year, so there’s no real rush on the Pac-12’s part.

Still, the conference must find two more members to become viable ahead of the July 1, 2026, deadline. Possible additions include Mountain West members the United States Air Force Academy and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), along with Tulane University and the University of Memphis, both of the American Athletic Conference.

Tulane would be an outlier because it’s a private institution. All six schools within the newly formed Pac-12 are public. Memphis and Tulane also don’t make as much geographic sense — not that geography has any bearing on conference realignment (witness Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley in the “Atlantic” Coast Conference).

Boise State and Colorado State, while not on the Pacific Coast per se, are at least in the West, lending some geographic sanity to the chaos-consuming college football conference-hopping.

Although adding the four schools resuscitates the Pac-12, it doesn’t return the conference’s “Power 5” status, which it lost when its members jumped ship.

Technically speaking, the NCAA now considers the Pac-12 a “nonautonomous FBS conference,” similar to the designation afforded Group of 5 conferences such as the Sun Belt and Conference USA. “Autonomous” conferences in the “Power 4” have the authority to create their own rules to benefit student-athletes.

That also means the Pac-12 doesn’t warrant an automatic bid to the 12-team college football playoff. Slots are reserved for the Power 4 conference champions, along with the highest-ranking champion from the Group of 5. Pac-12 schools would, however, be eligible for one of the remaining seven at-large bids.

For a while, it looked like Oregon State and Washington State might officially join the Mountain West, once and for all tossing the Pac-12 into the dustbin of history.

Alas, essentially, the opposite happened. Four schools are waving farewell to the Mountain West in a bid to reconstitute the Pac-12.

So the Pac-12 will survive, it seems, but in name only. It won’t have the cachet or national relevance it once held.

The Mountain West never had either. Boise State has made some noise in bowl games, and Fresno State’s basketball team experienced success under towel-munching coach Jerry Tarkanian, but these schools won’t revive the Pac-12 glory days of Rose Bowl victories, Heisman Trophy winners, and basketball dynasties.

And as for the Mountain West, the conference faces a future with eight members, including Air Force, the University of Hawaii, the University of Nevada, the University of New Mexico, San Jose State University, UNLV, Utah State University, and the University of Wyoming.

That is, for now. There’s already speculation the Mountain West will try to poach other conferences, such as Conference USA, or perhaps entice Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) schools like the University of Montana and the University of North Dakota to use Mountain West membership as a springboard to Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) status.

Or it might experience an exodus similar to what happened with the Pac-12. Rumors suggest Air Force might be considering a move to the American Athletic Conference.

As always, it’s best to log conference realignments with a pencil. In this new era of college sports, with players and schools engaged in a cash-grabbing free-for-all, anything is possible.