What happened to the Pac-12? Why conference now has only Oregon State, Washington State, but others pending

On Saturday, two of college football’s more bitter regional rivalries will add another chapter to the lengthy histories, with No. 6 Oregon traveling to Oregon State and Washington hosting Washington State.

The games have long been a fixture of college football in the Pacific Northwest and for decades they had a say in helping determine who won a conference championship and earned a trip to the Rose Bowl (or, sometimes, even the national championship game).

This year, however, the Apple Cup and the game formerly known as the Civil War will look a little different. Rather than their customary place at the end of the regular season, the matchups are occurring in Week 3. And, perhaps more notably, for the first time in a long time, these will be non-conference games.

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For generations, the two Oregon and two Washington schools were members of the same western-based conference that went through various names depending on the number of members it had at a given time, going from the Pac-8 to the Pac-10 to, ultimately, the Pac-12.

Now, though, that 109-year-old league is a fraction of what it once was — literally — with Saturday’s pair of rivalry games reflecting that new reality. Washington and Oregon are now in the Big Ten, along with longtime conference mates UCLA and USC. Washington State and Oregon State stand as the Pac-12’s lone two remaining members...for now.

How, exactly, did it get to this point, with a century-old entity crumbling in a matter of weeks? Here’s a closer look at the Pac-12, its history, its disintegration and where the conference stands now:

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Pac-12 history

What became the Pac-12 was founded in 1915 as the Pacific Coast Conference, with Washington, Oregon, Oregon State and Cal as charter members. In the decade that followed, it added Washington State, Stanford, USC and UCLA to its ranks, along with Idaho and Montana, both of which left the league in the 1950s.

By 1968, it was rebranded as the Pacific-8 (Pac-8, for short) and became the Pac-10 in 1978 when it brought aboard Arizona and Arizona State from the Western Athletic Conference.

Nearly a half-century later in 2010, the conference, under new commissioner Larry Scott, appeared on the verge of one of the most consequential moves in the history of conference realignment by reportedly seeking to add Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado.

That potential expansion, which would have reduced the Big 12’s membership to just six schools, ultimately never came to be. Only Colorado took the league up on its offer, though Scott also added Utah from the Mountain West Conference. The league did what so few others do, and changed its name to reflect its current membership count, going from the Pac-10 to the Pac-12.

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What happened to the Pac-12?

That new 12-school setup would prove to be short-lived. That demise was caused by several different factors.

The Pac-12 fell behind financially

Even before its members began to flee, the conference showed metaphorical cracks. Scott, who was once hailed as a bold and visionary leader, made several critical missteps that damaged the Pac-12’s fortunes.

The Pac-12 Network was supposed to be a source of perpetual revenue in the same way that the Big Ten Network and SEC Network are for their eponymous leagues, but it never met those optimistic projections. The conference got a subpar distribution deal, limiting its reach to just 12.4 million subscribers in 2023 (compared to 46.4 million for the SEC Network). It never brought in an established network as an equity partner — like what the SEC has with ESPN and the Big Ten with Fox — with the 12 universities instead opting to keep full ownership of the operation.

Cable providers paid only 14 cents per subscriber per month to carry the Pac-12 Network, a fraction of what they shelled out for the SEC Network (97 cents) and Big Ten Network (77 cents), according to estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

That relative lack of revenue was compounded by lavish spending.

Scott was the highest-paid conference commissioner in 2019-20, bringing in $5.4 million during that time. He moved the league’s headquarters from Walnut Creek, California in the East Bay to downtown San Francisco, where the Pac-12 rented out 113,000 square feet of office space for what journalist John Canzano reported to be $92 million over 11 years.

Though the league continued to remain a juggernaut in non-revenue sports, its schools’ football and men’s basketball teams struggled to earn their sport’s biggest prizes. No Pac-12 team won a football or men’s basketball national title during Scott’s tenure. Only Oregon, in 2017, even made it to a Final Four. The conference didn’t have a member in the College Football Playoff for six consecutive seasons, from 2017-22.

Scott’s run as the Pac-12 commissioner ended in June 2021, one year before his contract was set to expire.

The lack of a competitive media rights deal

Even once Scott was gone and George Kliavkoff took his place, the Pac-12’s problems persisted. Many of those headaches stemmed from a single-yet-all-important issue: the conference’s media rights contract.

Shortly after adding Colorado and Utah and tacking on a conference championship game in football, the Pac-12 signed a 12-year, $3 billion media rights deal with Fox and ESPN. Under that deal, the conference’s schools agreed to equal revenue sharing.

In the years that followed, however, other conferences signed bigger, more lucrative television contracts. With the money from those deals making up the overwhelming majority of the annual payouts from a conference to its members, the Pac-12 started to fall behind.

As the end of its media rights deal loomed in 2024, those financial shortcomings were paired with a sense of unease about what might come next. With that festering, what had historically been one of the most stable leagues in college athletics began to crumble.

In June 2022, UCLA and USC were accepted as new members of the Big Ten, creating a once-unimaginable marriage between a largely midwestern conference and two schools in Los Angeles.

Without the Bruins and Trojans — as well as their foothold in the nation’s second-largest media market — the Pac-12’s efforts to land a sufficient media rights deal were made exponentially more difficult. ESPN had made an initial offer that would have paid out $30 million per school, but the 10 remaining Pac-12 members countered by asking for $50 million per school, according to Canzano.

With those talks stalling, Fox and ESPN went out and reached a deal with the Big 12 for $31.7 million per school. Perhaps most notably, the Big 12’s television contract wasn’t set to expire until after the 2024-25 athletic year, meaning it effectively jumped the Pac-12 in line.

Prior to that, the Big 12 had survived a scare of its own following the announced departures of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC in 2021. Rather than poach any of the Big 12’s eight remaining members, the Pac-12 — which still had UCLA and USC in the fold at the time — stayed put. The Big 12 turned around and added Cincinnati, Houston, UCF and BYU to fortify its standing.

With a media rights deal still not secured, more dominoes started to fall for the Pac-12.

In July 2023, Colorado announced it was leaving the league after 12 years to return to the Big 12. In the ensuing days, Kliavkoff presented the Pac-12’s nine increasingly anxious remaining members with the framework of a media rights deal with streaming service Apple TV.

The five-year contract reportedly would have been worth $23 million annually per school, a number that would have jumped to $31.7 million if the league could drive 1.7 million subscriptions to Apple TV. If it was somehow able to attract five million new subscriptions, that would climb to $50 million, putting it much closer to the Big Ten and SEC than Big 12 or ACC as far as payouts.

For many of those schools, it wasn’t a compelling option or, at the very least, it came with an inherent risk that wouldn’t be found in a pact with a more traditional linear television provider. Within days, Oregon and Washington announced they were joining UCLA and USC in the Big Ten while Arizona, Arizona State and Utah followed Colorado to the Big 12.

Shortly thereafter, two of the remaining four Pac-12 schools — Cal and Stanford — joined the ACC, leaving the Beavers and Cougars as the only remaining teams of the old Pacific Coast Conference.

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Pac-12 expansion

After all those defections, the Pac-12 is down to just two members — Oregon State and Washington State, who are now part of what is widely and jokingly referred to as the “Two Pac.”

Though the Pac-12 is still technically a conference, the Beavers and Cougars had to look elsewhere to fill out their schedules. With a slew of open dates to fill, both schools reached a scheduling agreement with the Mountain West in which they will play three home and three road games a year against Mountain West programs. According to The Athletic, Oregon State and Washington State paid the Mountain West $14 million for those six games.

The deal provides some short-term comfort, but it’s just a one-year arrangement. The Mountain West opted not to renew the deal after a self-imposed deadline passed on Sept. 1.

“For the 2025 season, the Mountain West and its member institutions are moving forward with their conference and nonconference schedules,” the league said in a statement.

What had been a temporary alliance birthed by necessity has now become a predator-prey relationship.

Late Wednesday night, news broke that the Pac-12 was adding four schools from the Mountain West — Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State and Fresno State — who will begin competing in the reconstructed conference beginning in the 2026-27 athletic year.

Yahoo Sports reported that the move was expected to be the first in "a multi-phase expansion endeavor" to get up to at least eight schools, the NCAA minimum for an entity to qualify as an FBS conference. That means the Mountain West, having already lost four of its highest-profile members, could be facing even more departures soon.

It will come with a cost for the Pac-12, though. The Mountain West is reportedly owed an exit fee of "roughly $18 million," according to ESPN, from each outbound school, along with an additional $10 to $12 million penalty fee from the Pac-12 for every school it takes, according to the terms of the scheduling agreement.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What happened to Pac-12? Why one-time power conference has two teams — for now