With the Pac 2 having grown to the Pac 7.5, what’s next for the rebuilding conference?
Having survived the defection of ten of its members, the Pac-12 is once again on the rise. Last week, the conference added Gonzaga to its ranks for 2026, making it the premier school in the West Coast Conference and a national basketball powerhouse.
That doesn’t signal the end of the Pac-12’s rebuilding efforts. The conference still needs at least one more football school to meet the NCAA’s requirements for conference membership, four more schools total if it wants to officially be the Pac-12 and not resort to the Midwest concept of not having your conference name and number of member schools’ line up.
As it searches for options to return to 12 schools, it would probably be a good idea for the leagues the Pac-12 has scheduling agreements with for the next few years to sleep with one eye open at night. The Pac-12 has already swiped schools from the Mountain West and now the WCC, and depending on how things shake out, it could be coming back for more.
The ideal lineup for the Pac-12 would be convincing Stanford and Cal to come back home to the West Coast. Other than Oregon State and Washington State, those two schools were left as the odd ones out when everyone else bolted for the Big Ten (excuse me, “B1G”) and Big 12. They joined the Atlantic Coast Conference (now the “Any” Coast Conference), which may help with their football programs but will put immense strain on the travel budget for every other sport.
Convincing those two schools to come back would give the Pac-12 a massive boost in prestige, bulk up the football standing in the conference, and possibly make the conference the premier basketball conference in the country. The next step would be to lean it to the basketball reputation, return to the WCC and California again, and bring in St. Mary’s. The Gaels are the WCC’s number two basketball program and have gone toe-to-toe with Gonzaga for years.
If the Pac-12 brings in those three, that would leave them nine football schools and two non-football schools, leaving one football slot. With those 11 in place, the conference’s future would already be secure, so the conference could go hunting for a 12th member to provide the best recruiting area. That could mean bringing in someone like Hawaii or taking another run at UTEP or Texas State to get into Texas.
The alternatives could be a bit murkier if the Pac-12 can’t pull off a “California dreamin’” scenario. It’s already raided the Mountain West numerous times, and that conference is rebuilding itself. The WCC is now missing its flagship school, so it’s not inconceivable that the Pac-12 tries to wrangle one more football member to get to 8 full members, then comes back after the WCC for three more non-football schools. Targets there could include Portland, which would give WSU, OSU, and Gonzaga an easy travel destination, Saint Mary’s, and then any one of the other California schools.
However, that solution would keep the new Pac-12 squarely as a new “mid-major” conference. Oregon State and Oregon State don’t regularly make appearances in the College Football Top 25. Boise State and Fresno State would be the only other “upper” mid-major teams in the conference. This track would keep the conference alive for now. Still, as major conferences keep hunting for new members in expansion and mid-major conferences keep cannibalizing each other to fill gaps, it certainly would not guarantee the conference’s long-term survival.
The unfortunate thing about the path the Pac-12 has taken to ensure its continued existence is the very cannibalization of the mid-major conferences. Technically, the Mountain West continues to exist, but without Fresno State and Boise State, it is essentially a zombie league, just waiting for others to come along and finish it. The WCC may survive the loss of Gonzaga. As much as it’s their NCAA tournament revenue and attendance for when Gonzaga visits, they can likely plug in a school like Grand Canyon University or Seattle University and continue to exist in their non-football world. However, if St. Mary’s also pulls up stakes, the league will quickly find itself without its two marquee NCAA tournament teams and struggling to keep the revenue streams flowing.
Like the annual coaching carousel, the music for the conference re-alignment game of musical chairs eventually stops somewhere. Last time around, the Pac-12 left without a chair. Now that they have the music going again, it could be the Mountain West, the WAC, or the WCC, who find their membership decimated when the music stops. The Mountain West may be able to survive (for now) the Pac-12’s raid on their membership, but they will only be able to do it by raiding other conferences, which the Pac-12 could also be targeting to fill out its ranks.
Regardless of whether it gets its top targets to fill out the league, the Pac-12 has once again shaken up the college sports landscape, and the world of mid-major conferences will never be the same.
