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After 14 months of speculation, Oregon and Washington are officially headed to the Big 10. Without its two largest remaining brands, the Pac-12 simply cannot survive. It's only pathway to continuity was retaining Oregon and Washington and getting its nine schools (post-Colorado, USC and UCLA departures) to agree to a new media rights contract.
The exodus of Oregon and Washington was the knock-out blow to the West Coast's century-old conference. Shortly after, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State applied for membership in the Big 12. Official word on that move should be announced shortly.
That leaves Washington State, Oregon State, Cal and Stanford in the Pac-12. This will be the last season of the Pac-12's existence as we know it. The league's media rights contract expires in the summer of 2024, and there's three realistic outcomes after that.
1. The Pac-12 collapses
It's very possible that the Pac-12 just dissolves. All of its schools leave for other conferences and there is literally just nothing left. Oregon State and Washington State would likely join the Mountain West Conference, and Stanford and Cal would seek to join the Big 10 or Big 12. Stanford and Cal respect their own academic prestige and Olympic pedigree too much to join a conference filled with schools like Boise State and San Jose State.
2. Reload with new members
In theory, the Pac-12 could poach schools from other conferences to fill out the league. The league could bring in a bunch of new B and C-tier member schools, agree to a much smaller media rights contract, and continue to exist as a small-market conference. It would not be competitive in college football, it would not get national attention, but it would be alive.
There's a few problems with this scenario. First, no school that is already locked into a media rights contract with its own conference is going to be the first to leave in order to try and save the Pac-12. There's no guarantee it works out, and the hypothetical TV deal is certainly going to be network-friendly, or it's going to come from a streamer like Apple or Amazon. No athletic director or university president wants any part of that.
It's also not so easy to just nab schools from other conferences. No school from the SEC, ACC, Big 10 or Big 12 is leaving the strong television deals in already in place for the long term. The next, most obvious choice is the Mountain West schools. However, this is also an impossibility. There's a $32MM exit fee for a Mountain West school to leave the conference before the 2025-26 football season.
The Pac-12 could turn to schools like SMU or Tulane. But again, with — at best — a bad media rights contract, those schools would rather go join the Big 12.
The last issue is that Pac-12 just needs too many schools to join. In order to field a full conference schedule, the league needs at least nine teams, and that's if they switched to an eight-team league schedule. If it only needed to bring in one or two teams, this is a different story.
3. Merge with another conference
The last option is for the Pac-12 to merge with another conference. Due to its regional proximity to the Pac-12, its previously existing schedule overlap with the Pac-12, and it's similar level of competition to the four remaining Pac-12 schools, the Mountain West is the best candidate.
Now, practically speaking, this isn't that different of an outcome than the Pac-12 collapsing and the Mountain West absorbing the remaining schools. The main distinctions would all be on the legal side, but the bottom line is essentially the same.
In 2020, the Mountain West signed a six-year media rights contract with CBS and Fox worth $270 million that kicked in ahead of the 2020-21 season. Member schools each receive $4 million per year. That contract expires after the 2025-26 season.
If all four remaining Pac-12 schools ended up in the Mountain West (despite Stanford's high-brow qualms about the rural nature of this conference), they probably wouldn't earn a full share, but they would have a conference for two football seasons until the time for a TV contract extension comes.
After that, the 12 current Mountain West schools would benefit greatly from the additions of Stanford and Cal, and a new media rights contract would return a significantly higher dollar figure to MWC member schools.
However, Stanford and Cal wouldn't stick around, and Oregon State and Washington State probably wouldn't either. Even if a new deal paid out $10 million to member schools, that's still a huge step backwards from the current Pac-12 contract, or those of the larger conferences. No doubt, those schools would search for a new home in one of remaining Power 5, now Power 4, conferences.
