Bad news first: College sports continues to besiege itself with chaotic realignment of its conferences, leaving even more schools with reasons to be paranoid about their future ability to keep up with the nation’s Joneses. Good news next: At least the latest realignment bomb to go off makes some geographic sense and rescues some teams that deserve it.
It’s been more than three years since the Southeastern Conference started this latest wave of restructuring by poaching Oklahoma and Texas from the Big 12. That league responded by grabbing a handful of teams from the American Athletic, which in turn raided Conference USA, which in turn added an independent school and brought up a few reclassifying schools from the lower-level Football Championship Subdivision. On an overlapping timeline, the Big Ten responded to the SEC by swiping the Pac-12’s two Los Angeles schools, USC and UCLA. Later, Oregon and Washington quaked in their boots over the Pac-12’s survival and joined the Big Ten. Most of the rest of the Pac-12 fled a sinking ship and wound up in the Big 12.
This whole mess, carried out in the service of media-rights money, left a pair of orphans. Washington State and Oregon State were the most geographically remote schools in the Pac-12. They have passionate but not huge fanbases. The Big 12 did not offer a life raft when the Conference of Champions fell apart after a decade of horrible mismanagement. So this fall, the Cougars and Beavers have become a realignment cautionary tale. They are a conference of two. Without enough teams to stage a conference championship game, they’re the only teams among 134 in the top level of college football who cannot access an automatic bid to the new 12-team College Football Playoff. The sport has told them that they can’t even dream. Even sad-sack programs get lip service to the possibility of rising to the top. Wazzu and Oregon State do not.
And yet, now we have arrived at the section of the food chain where the Beavers and Cougars are the predators. On Thursday, the two-team Pac-12 announced it was adding four schools from the Mountain West Conference: Boise State, Fresno State, San Diego State, and Colorado State. The Pac-12 will try to keep adding, at least until it reaches the eight-team threshold to be treated as a regular conference under NCAA rules, and it may continue growing beyond that. These additions followed the breakdown of a scheduling agreement between the two Pac-12 schools and the Mountain West, who are playing each other a lot this year while Oregon State and Washington State drift out at sea. Finally, we’ve reached the point in the realignment spiral where the teams that were once prey have become the aggressors, acting out of survivalism rather than greed. That will spawn more anxiety, more movement, and even less of the precious little stability that exists now.
The Big Ten’s and SEC’s splashy acquisitions were efforts by the rich to consolidate power. Then the Big 12 beat out the Pac-12 and ACC to be the biggest and baddest league of all the rest, and then the Pac-12 (such as it was) died. The reformation of the Pac-12 is the latest moment of victimized schools realizing that their only logical path forward is to prey on schools at a lower station. At least this time, unlike when the Big Ten and SEC expanded, the involved schools did not have a wide range of choices.
Washington State and Oregon State were in an untenable situation. They don’t have the financial heft to survive as independent schools. As a two-team stub of a conference without the ability to build a marquee schedule, they have no access to the playoff. The only move on the board was to combine in some fashion with current Mountain West schools. The Cougs and Beavs could have shocked the system less by joining up with nearly all of the Mountain West, instead of stranding eight teams in a decimated league by taking by far its biggest brand, Boise State, and three more of its most resourced programs. But the world was not merciful to Wazzu and OSU last year. They weren’t in a mood to be altruistic now.
The schools getting the Pac-12 call have all wanted to make a conference leap for a long time. San Diego State was on the verge of joining the old, stronger Pac-12 before that league fell apart in a matter of days in 2023. Boise State and Colorado State pitched the Big 12 in the mid-2010s, when it looked like that conference would expand but then opted against it. Fresno State has long had one of the most competitive football teams outside the power conferences but wasn’t a big enough brand in a populous enough place to get a nibble from a bigger league. All of these schools have felt stuck in a Mountain West with a bunch of moribund football programs. Boise State and the rest of the league got into a big tiff over TV money a few years ago. No one has seemed happy. Colorado State’s been bad at football, too.
Realignment anxiety being what it is, the Pac-12 and its new schools are a sensible match. These are all Pacific and Mountain time zone schools. In a world where Central Florida and Arizona State now share one conference, and where Rutgers and UCLA now share another, it’s refreshing to see schools pair up with opponents that don’t create a travel pain in the ass for their fans. This won’t be the Pac-12 in anything but name and intellectual property rights, but those rights do have value that the “Mountain West” brand does not. A handful of schools that don’t have a lot are in a better position today than yesterday, and nobody involved is compromising their players’ or fans’ experience.
But all the same, some schools that got shivved in the last realignment news cycle are now doing the shivving. The Mountain West’s remaining eight schools are San Jose State, UNLV, Hawaii, Utah State, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Air Force. They’re in a bit better of a situation than Oregon State and Washington State were in all alone. At least they’ve got eight teams still around. It’s possible that a few of these teams preferred not to be part of the reformed Pac-12, for reasons unknown. It seems from Yahoo Sports’ reporting that UNLV may have had a hard time separating from the University of Nevada, which has the same overseers in the same university system. But the league stinks now, and more members will look for an escape hatch, and a few athletic departments that are always straddling a line between hopeful and sickly will wind up in financial and competitive hell.
Conference realignment is well over a century old. Nothing in college sports is ever new. But realignment is much less escapable now, even for the short term, than it was just a few years ago. We’re now going on three and a half years of moves that spawned directly from the SEC’s additions of Texas and Oklahoma. (If you believe the Big Ten would have added USC and UCLA even without the SEC’s moves the summer before, then we’re still more than two years into this particular set of aftershocks.) One thing in realignment has always led to the next and the next, but it did not always happen at such a constant drumbeat. When the Big Ten added Maryland and Rutgers in the early 2010s, for example, it did not create a three-year scramble that reshaped every league in the power conferences.
Now it is endless. News of the Pac-12 nuking the Mountain West broke just before midnight on a Wednesday night in Week 3 of the football season. Realignment is no longer just summer fodder; it now clouds out parts of the actual, ongoing season. This will not end until every school in the country has convinced itself that it has optimized itself for maximum media-rights distributions. What will happen next is predictable: The schools that got left behind in the Mountain West this week will go shopping for teams from Conference USA or the FCS, aiming to bulk up by diluting other leagues next.
I don’t know when we’ll reach even a five- or 10-year period of realignment chillaxing. Florida State and Clemson are locked in a legal heat with the ACC as they seek a path to leave that conference. The most powerful schools in the SEC and the Big Ten have probably noticed that they may not have to equally share their television revenue forever with the Vanderbilts, Missouris, Purdues, and Northwesterns of their conferences. What will happen when they decide they don’t need passengers? Yesterday the teams thrown into the blender were Washington State and Oregon State. Today they are Utah State and Hawaii. Tomorrow (or more likely in a few years), they may be teams that currently think they’ve got a pretty good deal. Realignment is not new, but it continues to set a new bar for exhausting endlessness.
