Source: Pac-12 poised to add Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State
Source: Pac-12 poised to add Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State
The Conference of Champions is on the brink of completing Step 1 of its rebuild, poaching the Mountain West Conference in the process.
The Conference of Champions may soon become the Conference of Comebacks.
The Pac-12 is poised to add four Mountain West Conference schools — Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State — in the first step of rebuilding the league, a person with knowledge of the situation told The Inside Zone.
The additions would bring the Pac-12 to six total schools, including incumbents Oregon State and Washington State, putting the conference just two shy of the minimum eight schools needed to be recognized as an FBS conference. There is a two-year grace period for conferences that fall below that eight-school minimum, with the Pac-12 in the first year of that period after losing 10 schools to the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12.
The move could be finalized as early as Thursday. Yahoo Sports first reported the news Wednesday evening.
Both the Beavers and Cougars are playing six MWC opponents this season to fill out their schedules, although they are not eligible for the conference championship. The element of poaching — be it those two consolidating with the MWC, or using the Pac-12’s residual assets to recruit MWC members — was always a looming threat, and it became a bigger possibility when the Sept. 1 deadline for both parties to extend their scheduling agreement came and went without a commitment for 2025.
Ironically enough, the news comes during the same week that both remaining Pac-12 schools play their in-state rivals who left for the Big Ten, as Oregon State hosts Oregon and Washington State faces Washington at Seattle’s Lumen Field.
The 12-team MWC’s current media rights deal with CBS Sports and Fox expires after the 2025-26 season. The four incoming Pac-12 schools would start play in their new conference in 2026-27.
Each school departing the MWC is expected to owe a $17 million exit fee and a poaching fee in the neighborhood of $10 million, as agreed to as part of this year’s scheduling alliance — a massive price tag for a league whose TV deal pays member schools an average of $3 million per year. But the Pac-12 has a chamber of remaining assets aiding in its rebuild, including departing members’ fees, NCAA tournament units and Pac-12 Enterprises, which was formerly the Pac-12 Network.
The Pac-12 promoted deputy commissioner Teresa Gould to commissioner of the 108-year-old conference in February, after parting ways with George Kliavkoff.
“A lot of people care about, including me, a lot of people care about and have a long history and are very nostalgic about the Pac-12, and would love to see it continue,” Gould told The Inside Zone in July ahead of the conference’s media day. “I always just want to be really clear, though, that that possibility of a Pac-12 rebuild is one of a number of different scenarios that we have to consider. And I always want to be really clear that my job and what I got hired to do was put these two programs in the best possible position for the long haul. That might be rebuilding the Pac-12, it might not be. And my commitment and obligation to them is to be open-minded about any potential scenario that might come down the pipe.
“And I'm sure there's scenarios we don't even know about at this point, to be honest with you, given kind of the chaos in the industry right now. But that's my thought process on it, is yes, that is one of the scenarios. It may end up not being the best scenario for those two programs, and we have to be laser-focused on what's best for them.”
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