What's the next step for the Pac-12? After this past week, anything is possible.
New commissioner Teresa Gould pulled off a stunner this week in landing four new schools. On Friday, she spoke to The Inside Zone about her league's future.
Teresa Gould will probably never become a household name in Pac-12 country the way her predecessors did.
And that’s a good thing.
No promises of a revolutionary TV network that ends up killing the conference. No sweet talk around a Playoff format or media rights deal that never arrives.
Heck, the first-year Pac-12 commissioner doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.
No, Gould simply rolled her sleeves up and went to work in rebuilding a proud 108-year-old conference, breathing live into the league and shaking up the college landscape not even three weeks into her first football season.
This is what she told The Inside Zone in July, when asked how she would define success through her two-year contract: “Well, if I'm successful in achieving what I signed up for, and my entire motive for being willing to stay on and take this on was to make sure that these student-athletes have a home and a place where they can succeed and compete at the highest level, which is what they came to Pullman and Corvallis to do. So at the end of the two years, my success will be measured by whether or not we were successful in paving that pathway for the future.
“I don't know what that is going to be, but I know that we're very aligned and have a set of guiding principles around what we need to accomplish through that. And if I'm successful in doing that, then I'll be able to move on after my two years and feel good about what I did on behalf of these student-athletes.”
Talk about under-selling and over-delivering.
That was two months ago. On Thursday, Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State announced that they are officially leaving the Mountain West Conference for the Pac-12 in 2026. The Pac-12 needs two more schools before ’26 to be recognized as an FBS conference — it could add even more than that — and now all eyes are on the West Coast as schools across the country jockey for an invite.