The Pac-12 Five Should Have Stuck It Out

A rebuilt Pac-12 with what remained after the Big Ten exodus would have made for great football and basketball.

Let’s get a necessary caveat to the following out of the way upfront: The opinion within this edition of Press Break comes from an admitted Pac-12 homer. What can I say? I like my college athletic conferences to have a distinct, regional identity. Sue me.

Big Ten manifest destiny never sat right with me, even when it only extended the conference’s reach to the Atlantic with Rutgers and Maryland. It’s been more than a decade, and neither program has ever felt like a Big Ten member. Likewise, I can’t foresee Pacific institutions Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington ever being part of the club in the same way as Michigan, Ohio State or even later arrival Penn State.

However, the Big Ten offered money and a place in one of the two entities that promises to — and is already beginning to — restructure college sports for two-conference exclusivity. Now, had Oregon and Washington remained in the Pac-12 even after USC and UCLA announced their exits in 2022, I contend the Pac would have remained a better all-around football league than the Big Ten, but that’s neither here nor there.

TV powers made their decision, and the Pacific Northwest schools had to accept.

Similarly, I cannot begrudge Colorado’s decision to return to the Big 12 largely because Colorado never felt like a fit in the Pac-12. Whereas fellow 2011 newcomer Utah meshed seamlessly, competing consistently in a variety of sports — most notably football — CU floundered.

So, accepting the exits of the Big Ten quartet and Colorado as inevitable, that leaves seven programs that could have, should have rebuilt the Pac-12 together. Instead, the game of chicken TV forced between the Pac and Big 12 presented a choice: Sign now and survive, or die.

The Big 12 acted, in the process snatching up the Arizona schools and Utah to join its continental coalition of members whose lone shared trait seems to be that they’re all above mid-major level, but not worthy of the Power 2.

What’s more, it has felt from an outsider’s perspective that the Pac-12 refugees were welcomed less with enthusiasm than with gleefully sneering scorn from Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark comparable to that of Mr. Burns rehiring a desperate Homer Simpson.

The new Big 12 sucks. It feels like the original incarnation of Conference USA, only with a messier geographic footprint and even less unifying the members, all while dressed up in a veneer that guy who still wears Von Dutch caps in 2025 would consider classy.

In that sense, the Big 12’s hideous basketball tournament floor is an apt metaphor for the conference’s current state.

My disdain for the restructured Big 12 and its media presence primarily as inventory for ESPN Plus feeds the broader point; the topic suggested in the headline to this digital tirade: A Pac-12 rebuilt on the foundation of its seven surviving members would have been better in every conceivable way.

When I write seven, I am including the three Big 12 refugees; the holdouts, Oregon State and Washington; and Bay Area schools Cal and Stanford. As maddening as I find the makeup of the current Big 12, I won’t even get started on how asinine it is for the Atlantic Coast Conference to host the Golden Bears and Cardinal.

Certainly the league sustained serious damage losing the Big Ten foursome, particularly in football with Oregon winning five conference championships in full seasons from 2009 through 2019. The Ducks and rival Washington also accounted for the Pac’s lone appearances in the College Football Playoff.

And, while USC has lived on reputation for approaching two full decades with just one league title after 2008, its history and presence in Los Angeles carry undeniable weight.

All that said, the initial Surviving Seven had impressive, recent history and future potential to fall back on. Both Utah and Stanford claimed as many conference championships in the 12-team era as Washington, and Utah became the league’s most consistently winning program for the final 10 years; Arizona bookended the decade of the four-team College Football Playoff with 10- and 11-win seasons; and Arizona State, long regarded as perhaps the sport’s biggest sleeping giant, began life in the Big 12 realizing that potential with a run to the Playoff.

Speaking of 2024 season Playoff participants, SMU was a rumored target to replenish the Pac-12 ranks during summer 2023.

Had woefully ill-prepared commissioner George Kliavkoff accomplished anything to suggest the Pac could persevere, the addition of SMU would have been a home run: A program with extensive history and plenty of future upside in a major media market.

San Diego State was set to go — so much so, the Pac crumbling in 2023 cost the school $17 million. As it stands, the Aztecs are still Pac-bound as charter members of the resurrected league.

With its 2023 Final Four run as the centerpiece, San Diego State basketball has grown into a perennial winner that will rival Gonzaga as the new Pac-12’s hardwood pillars. On the gridiron, Rocky Long showed for a decade straight that the Aztecs can win consistently.

San Diego is also a great sports city — when the product delivers. On the podcast Talkin’ Baseball, Trevor Plouffe recently described the atmosphere at Petco Park for Padres games as akin to big-time college football.

At SDSU, Viejas Arena packs in sell-out crowds for virtually every Aztecs game since the program became a March Madness fixture in the early 2010s.

With a beautiful new stadium just down the hill from campus, San Diego State football now plays in a venue ripe for raucous crowds. Coupled with San Diego County’s deep and talented high-school football scene, and a monopoly on the Southern California media market in the Pac-12, San Diego State can be dominant in the new conference.

Likewise, SDSU would have been a prominent figure in a Pac-12 that retained its original seven departures.

Rounding out a hypothetical Pac-12 rebuilt in 2023 are Boise State and what could be considered basketball’s spiritual parallel to Broncos football, Gonzaga. That makes for a 10-team conference in football, with two spots free for a variety of candidates:

• Arizona

• Arizona State

• Boise State

• Cal

• Gonzaga (non-football member)

• Oregon State

• San Diego State

• SMU

• Stanford

• Utah

• Washington State

Among the worthy options for the 11th and 12th football spots are Colorado State, headed to the Pac-12 as part of the resurrected league in 2026 and the most obvious choice behind Boise State, San Diego State and SMU in this hypothetical exercise. Colorado may have felt like a Big 12 misfit dropped under the Pac-12 umbrella, but nearby Colorado State could have been more comparable to Utah as a program moving up from the Mountain West.

For the 12th member, future Pac-12 members Fresno State and Utah State are obvious candidates — though with Cal/Stanford and Utah remaining, perhaps superfluous with the regions already represented. That leaves either UNLV, with Las Vegas a fast-growing city and the Pac having already establishing the city as part of its footprint well before the league dissolved; or newly introduced addition Texas State to give the conference a second presence in the Lone Star State while covering both the north and south.

This 12-team conference would:

1. Be worthy of an automatic Playoff bid

2. Maintain some semblance of regionality, both for itself and the Big 12 and ACC

3. Command a higher contract for the same TV coverage the revamped Pac-12 is receiving

Revisiting this situation also presents an opportunity to lament a missed opportunity for conferences to unite. Now, you may recall the brief existence of The Alliance — and for any pro wrestling fans reading Press Break: No, I am not referring to the ECW/WCW unification of 2001.

However, college football’s version was every bit as infuriating and a hugely missed opportunity.

The triumvirate of the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 shared a handshake agreement to work together to prevent SEC monopolization of college sports following the Southeastern Conference’s additions of Oklahoma and Texas.

That was before the Big Ten poached UCLA and USC.

Consensus at the time was that inviting Big 12 to the table once the Big Ten left was pointless; in 2022, the Big 12 seemed dead for all intents and purposes. In fact, Yormark’s less-than-welcoming attitude toward the Pac-12 refugees is somewhat justified given Klavikoff’s comments at 2022 Pac-12 media day alluding to poaching Big 12 members.

Had all parties set egos and presumptions aside, a three-conference alliance with more numbers than the Big Ten and SEC, working in concert to obtain TV rights that wrested some control away from FOX and ESPN, would be to the long-term benefit of the sport. A scenario in which the conferences packaged broadcasting rights together and formed scheduling pacts for guaranteed non-conference matchups — ensuring annual meetings between rivals like BYU-Utah, Pitt-West Virginia, Colorado-Colorado State — would have been ideal.

Carrying this hypothetical agreement to men’s basketball also means built-in, annual matchups with a pool of Arizona, Duke, Gonzaga, Houston, Iowa State, Kansas, Louisville, Memphis¹, North Carolina, San Diego State, Syracuse, Texas Tech and Virginia without bloating or destroying any of the three conferences.

I still believe that the case now and would love to see the current ACC and Big 12 work with the new Pac-12, though I realize that’s a pipe dream.

As much of a pipe dream is my proposed versions of the ACC and Big 12 had the Pac-12’s seven survivors stood firm and together through the 2023-2025 turbulence.

1. Memphis is part of my expansion plan in this hypothetical, landing in the Big 12. A less regionally preposterous expansion of the post-Red River exodus Big 12 and ACC could have looked as follows:

ACC

Boston College

Cincinnati

Clemson

Duke

Florida State

Georgia Tech

Louisville

Miami

North Carolina

NC State

Pitt

Syracuse

UCF

Virginia

Virginia Tech

Wake Forest

BIG 12

Baylor

BYU

Colorado

Houston

Iowa State

Kansas

Kansas State

Memphis

Oklahoma State

TCU

Texas Tech

Tulane