SAN FRANCISCO- Sports historians will look back on the date of August 4, 2023, as the possible day when the Pacific 12 (PAC 12) Conference may have unofficially collapsed. On Friday, Oregon and Washington announced their move to the BIG TEN Conference, joining their former PAC 12 Conference members, USC and UCLA. Just a few weeks earlier, Colorado announced that it was also leaving and moving back to the BIG 12 conference. Arizona has also announced it is leaving for the Big 12.
And if that was not worse enough, Arizona State and Utah announced they were also moving to the BIG 12. That leaves the PAC 12 just a shell of itself with the remaining schools of Stanford, Oregon State, California, and Washington State left to keep the dying conference alive. To make matters worse, some have joked that Stanford might want to seek admission to the Ivy League; after all, geography doesn’t seem to matter anymore looking at the moves of schools to more eastern conferences from the west.
The fire sale of the PAC 12 that has been the summer of 2023 has been caused by a series of bad decisions and lack of vision and willingness to change over the years. Couple all of this with a time zone problem that makes it difficult for the majority of the country to watch PAC 12 sports with a two and three hour time difference between the east and west coasts, and it became all too much for the conference to seek a television contract that would pay its member schools along the same level as the BIG TEN and the SEC.
The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) is going through a similar problem as the PAC 12, but for different reasons. At stake in the conference is competing for the dollar value of television contracts as they attempt to compete with the SEC and the BIG TEN. Member schools are reportedly at odds over the distribution of revenue among schools. Case in point is Florida State who has recently been the most vocal. So vocal, in fact, that the FSU Board of Trustees has openly threatened to leave the ACC if a deal could not be reached. On Friday, FSU announced it has hired J.P. Morgan & Chase Bank to analyze their financial position and to make recommendations to the Board of Trustees on options that may exist financially to seek membership in another conference. In doing so, ACC television contracts and agreements are in place and if broken, will force FSU or any other member school who seeks to leave the conference pay a big fine for breaking their contract(s).
In a related note, the University of North Carolina announced on Friday that they have no intentions to leave the ACC.
All of this is not new to college athletics. One could argue that it began thirty years ago when Arkansas left the old Southwest Conference (SWC) for the SEC. A wise financial move for the Razorbacks that was envisioned by the late Arkansas athletic director, Frank Broyles, but ultimately led to the demise of the SWC.
If this reporter were to make a guess, the conference realignments are not done, and more may occur over the next year. The conference commissioners appear to be exerting their power and influence to make moves that are in the financial best interests of their schools, and the NCAA appears to be less and less of a factor in the decisions that are being made.
On a final note, the newly adopted expanded football playoff system that increased playoff teams from four to twelve for the national football playoff starting in 2024 also appears to be affected. The new format was predicated on five power conferences, and if the PAC 12 conference folds, there will be only four remaining. So, will another conference be dubbed as a power conference, or will the format be reduced to four power conferences?
Regardless of what happens or doesn’t happen, it should be an interesting year ahead in college athletics. But for now, we may have been watching the demise of the once proud PAC 12 conference before our very eyes this summer.
