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What Happened to the Pac-12? Why a Once-Power Conference Has Two Teams — For Now

VaselineSeptember 15, 2024

5 7 minutes read

What Happened to the Pac-12? Why a Once-Power Conference Has Two Teams — For Now

On Saturday, two of college football’s fiercest regional rivalries add a new chapter to their long histories, with No. 6 Oregon traveling to Oregon State and Washington hosting Washington State.

These games have long been a fixture of college football in the Pacific Northwest, and for decades played a role in determining who won a conference championship and earned a trip to the Rose Bowl (or sometimes even the national championship game).

This year, however, the Apple Cup and the competition formerly known as the Civil War will look a little different. Instead of their usual spot at the end of the regular season, the matchups will take place in Week 3. And, perhaps most notably, for the first time in a long time, these will be non-conference games.

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For generations, the two schools in Oregon and Washington were members of the same conference in the West. This conference had different names depending on the number of members the organization had at any given time: from the Pac-8 to the Pac-10 and finally the Pac-12.

Now, that 109-year-old league is a fraction of what it once was — literally — with Saturday’s two rival games reflecting that new reality. Washington and Oregon are now in the Big Ten, along with old conference mates UCLA and USC. Washington State and Oregon State are the only two remaining members of the Pac-12…for now.

How exactly did it get to this point, with a centuries-old entity collapsing in a matter of weeks? Here’s a closer look at the Pac-12, its history, its disintegration, and where the conference stands today:

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Pac-12 History

What became the Pac-12 was founded in 1915 as the Pacific Coast Conference, with Washington, Oregon, Oregon State and Cal as charter members. In the decade that followed, it added Washington State, Stanford, USC and UCLA to its ranks, along with Idaho and Montana, both of which left the league in the 1950s.

In 1968, the name was changed to Pacific-8 (Pac-8 for short), and in 1978 the name was changed to Pac-10, when Arizona and Arizona State were acquired from the Western Athletic Conference.

Nearly half a century later, in 2010, the conference, under new commissioner Larry Scott, appeared to be on the verge of one of the most dramatic moves in conference realignment history. The conference reportedly wanted to add Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado.

That potential expansion, which would have reduced the Big 12’s membership to just six schools, ultimately never happened. Only Colorado took the league up on the offer, though Scott also added Utah from the Mountain West Conference. The league did what few others do and changed its name to reflect its current membership, from the Pac-10 to the Pac-12.

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What happened to the Pac-12?

The new set-up of 12 schools would prove to be short-lived. The decline was caused by several factors.

The Pac-12 fell behind financially

Even before the members began to flee, the conference was showing metaphorical cracks. Scott, once hailed as a bold and visionary leader, made several critical missteps that damaged the Pac-12’s fortunes.

The Pac-12 Network was supposed to be a source of ongoing revenue, much like the Big Ten Network and SEC Network are for their namesake leagues, but it never lived up to those optimistic projections. The conference received a subpar distribution deal that limited its reach to just 12.4 million subscribers by 2023 (compared to 46.4 million for the SEC Network). It never brought on an established network as an equity partner — as the SEC has with ESPN and the Big Ten with Fox — with the 12 universities opting to retain full ownership of the operation instead.

Cable providers paid just 14 cents per subscriber per month to air the Pac-12 Network, a fraction of what they paid for the SEC Network (97 cents) and Big Ten Network (77 cents), according to estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

This relative lack of revenue was further compounded by excessive spending.

Scott was the highest-paid conference commissioner in 2019-20, bringing in $5.4 million during that time. He moved the league’s headquarters from Walnut Creek, California in the East Bay to downtown San Francisco, where the Pac-12 leased 113,000 square feet of office space for what journalist John Canzano reported as $92 million over 11 years.

While the league remained a powerhouse in non-revenue sports, its college football and men’s basketball teams struggled to win their sport’s biggest prizes. No Pac-12 team won a national football or men’s basketball title during Scott’s tenure, with only Oregon reaching the Final Four in 2017. The conference went without a member in the College Football Playoff for six consecutive seasons, from 2017 to 2022.

Scott’s tenure as Pac-12 commissioner ended in June 2021, a year before his contract was set to expire.

The lack of a competing media rights agreement

Even with Scott gone and George Kliavkoff in his place, the Pac-12’s problems continued. Many of those headaches stemmed from a single, yet very significant issue: the conference’s media rights contract.

Shortly after Colorado and Utah were added and a conference championship game was added in football, the Pac-12 signed a 12-year, $3 billion media rights deal with Fox and ESPN. Under the deal, the conference’s schools agreed to share revenue equally.

In the years that followed, however, other conferences signed larger, more lucrative television contracts. Because the money from those deals represented the vast majority of a conference’s annual payouts to its members, the Pac-12 began to fall behind.

As the media rights deal neared its end in 2024, those financial shortcomings were accompanied by a sense of unease about what might come next. With that festering feeling, what had historically been one of the most stable leagues in college athletics began to crumble.

In June 2022, UCLA and USC were accepted as new members of the Big Ten, creating a once-unthinkable marriage between a largely Midwestern conference and two Los Angeles schools.

Without the Bruins and Trojans — and their foothold in the nation’s second-largest media market — the Pac-12’s attempts to strike a sufficient media rights deal became exponentially more difficult. ESPN had made an initial offer that would have paid $30 million per school, but the 10 remaining Pac-12 members countered by asking for $50 million per school, Canzano said.

When those talks broke down, Fox and ESPN struck a deal with the Big 12 for $31.7 million per school. Perhaps most notably, the Big 12’s television contract wouldn’t expire until after the 2024-25 sports year, meaning it effectively leapfrogged the Pac-12.

Before that, the Big 12 had survived a scare of its own, with Texas and Oklahoma reportedly leaving for the SEC in 2021. Rather than poach one of the eight remaining Big 12 members, the Pac-12 — then home to UCLA and USC — stayed put. The Big 12 turned around and added Cincinnati, Houston, UCF and BYU to shore up its position.

With no media rights deal yet in place, more dominoes began to fall for the Pac-12.

In July 2023, Colorado announced it would leave the league after 12 years to return to the Big 12. In the days that followed, Kliavkoff presented the nine increasingly anxious remaining members of the Pac-12 with the framework of a media rights deal with streaming service Apple TV.

The five-year contract was reportedly worth $23 million per year per school, a figure that would rise to $31.7 million if the league could attract 1.7 million Apple TV subscribers. If it could somehow attract five million new subscribers, that would jump to $50 million, putting it far closer to the Big Ten and SEC in payouts than the Big 12 or ACC.

For many of those schools, it wasn’t an attractive option, or at the very least, it carried an inherent risk that wouldn’t exist in a pact with a more traditional linear television provider. Within days, Oregon and Washington announced they would join UCLA and USC in the Big Ten, while Arizona, Arizona State and Utah followed Colorado into the Big 12.

Shortly afterward, two of the remaining four Pac-12 schools — Cal and Stanford — joined the ACC, leaving the Beavers and Cougars as the only remaining teams from the old Pacific Coast Conference.

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Pac-12 Expansion

After all the defections, the Pac-12 is down to just two members: Oregon State and Washington State, now part of what is commonly and jokingly referred to as the “Two Pac.”

While the Pac-12 is technically still a conference, the Beavers and Cougars had to look elsewhere to fill out their schedules. With a slew of open dates to fill, both schools reached a scheduling agreement with the Mountain West that will see them play three home games and three away games per year against Mountain West programs. According to The Athletic, Oregon State and Washington State paid the Mountain West $14 million for those six games.

The deal offers some short-term comfort, but it’s only a one-year arrangement. The Mountain West opted not to renew the deal after a self-imposed deadline passed on Sept. 1.

“For the 2025 season, the Mountain West and its member institutions will proceed with their conference and non-conference schedules,” the league said in a statement.

What was once a temporary alliance born out of necessity has now become a predator-prey relationship.

Late Wednesday night, it was announced that the Pac-12 would add four Mountain West schools — Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State and Fresno State — to compete in the reconstructed conference beginning in the 2026-27 sports year.

Yahoo Sports reported that the move is expected to be the first in “a multi-phase expansion project” to add at least eight schools, the NCAA minimum for an entity to qualify as an FBS conference. That means the Mountain West, which has already lost four of its most prominent members, could soon face even more departures.

It will come at a price for the Pac-12, however. According to ESPN, the Mountain West would be entitled to an exit fee of “approximately $18 million” from each school that leaves, along with an additional $10 to $12 million penalty from the Pac-12 for each school that takes over, under the terms of the scheduling agreement.

VaselineSeptember 15, 2024

5 7 minutes read