The Pacific Coast Conference (PAC-12) — or maybe more fitting, the PAC-4 — has more drama than a season of The Bachelor.
The demise of the PAC-12 has caused a domino effect in college sports. The 108-year-old conference’s existence is at risk after 8 of the 12 members decided to leave to join other conferences.
This season will be the last for the PAC-12 as the eight leaving members will be joining their respective conferences in 2024.
Despite San Jose State being in the Mountain West Conference, the fall of the PAC-12 will greatly affect SJSU’s future in college athletics regardless of where college athletics is after this round of realignment is finished.
How the realignment mess started
Conference realignment is not a new trend, but realignment at this level is surprising to say the least. Football and men’s basketball are, more times than not, the big athletic money makers at Division I universities.
Realignment has often worked as a vessel for big-brand conferences such as the Southeastern Conference (SEC), Big Ten Conference and the Big 12 Conference to add successful teams from smaller conferences to create more lucrative conference games and bring in more money for its member schools.
Schools make money through ticket and merchandise sales along with donor donations, but a majority of the money athletic departments make are from the media rights deals.
A media rights deal is the legal rights a broadcasting organization owns in order to put a conference’s game on television. Companies like ESPN, FOX, CBS and NBC are the main players when it comes to broadcasting college athletics.
SEC schools earn an average over $50 million per year through their media rights deal across numerous networks, according to an Aug. 18, 2022 The Athletic article.
The first misstep of the PAC-12 was the creation of its own network in 2012. Unlike the SEC and the Big 10 who have negotiated their broadcasting rights across Fox, CBS and NBC, the PAC-12 created their own network to televise games that had no tie to any mainstream TV network.
In theory, the idea was great. The PAC-12 and its members would rake in all the ad money and wouldn’t have to work with a middle man who would take a certain cut in order to broadcast games.
But the PAC-12 oversold themselves big time thinking that people outside the West Coast
would tune into their games. A key reason why broadcasting with a big network player like ESPN or Fox is a desirable option is because of the massive amounts of viewers those networks already have.
The first domino to fall came in 2021 when the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma decided to move from the Big 12 to the SEC. This forced the Big 12 to add three news teams into their conference from the smaller American Conference: UCF, Cincinnati and Houston.
This caused a chain reaction within the college football world as other conferences such as the Big 10 believed it needed to make a big move in order to compete with the SEC and Big 12.
The second domino was last summer when USC and UCLA announced their intention to join the Big 10. With the PAC-12 media rights deal expiring after the 2024 season along with the recent success of the USC football team and the UCLA basketball team The two Los Angeles-based schools sought bigger fortunes for its athletic programs.
This left the PAC-12 without the L.A. market to sell to potential buyers for their expiring media rights.
Then flash forward to this summer to PAC-12 media day. PAC-12 President George Kliavkoff said he was sure that the remaining 10 schools in 2024 will have a broadcast partner in the coming weeks.
“We'll get our media rights deal done, we'll announce the deal. I think the realignment that's going on in college athletics will come to an end for this cycle,” Kliavkoff said at PAC-12 Media Day on July 21.
In true PAC-12 fashion, a deal was not done. Kliavkoff presented the 10 remaining schools with a deal from Apple TV that would have dropped the revenue share of each school from the current $30 million per year payout to somewhere in the range of 20-25 million dollar per year with Apple TV, according to an Aug. 9 The Athletic article.
The combination of putting games on a streaming platform along with the $5-10 million pay cut led to PAC-12 member schools shopping around to join other conferences.
Colorado was the first school to leave, announcing on July 27 that they will join the Big 12.
That was proceeded by the two remaining “big brand” football teams in Oregon and Washington announcing on Aug. 4 that they would join the Big 10.
The train wreck kept going from there. Arizona, Arizona State and Utah decided to join the Big 12, leaving the PAC-12 with four remaining schools: Stanford, Cal, Washington State and Oregon State.
SJSU head coach Brent Brennan said he was disappointed hearing the news of the demise of the PAC-12.
“I think as a West Coast football fan, I'm disappointed to see that happen with the PAC 12,” Brennan said in a practice interview on Aug. 4. “Just like my whole life, I grew up watching all those games and going to games at Stanford or Cal or San Jose State. How does that change now?”
What impact does realignment have on college sports?
All of the reshuffling of teams has brought us to where we are today.
There are going to be essentially two major conferences in the Big 10 and the SEC. The Big 12 and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) — the two other power five conferences — have lost significant power in the dynamic of college athletics after some of the biggest college football brands flocked to the Big 12 and SEC.
Stanford and Cal, two historic athletic programs, are left without a home. Washington State and Oregon State, who’s athletic programs are on the rise, are now in limbo at no fault of their own.
Many would say the PAC-12 could follow suit with other programs and reload their conference with mid-major programs, specifically in the Mountain West Conference where geographically it could all make sense.
But, Mountain West teams will have to pay an exit fee of anywhere from 30-32 million dollars if they leave before 2025 according to an Aug. 4 report from ESPN.
The other option for the remaining PAC-12 teams would be to join other conferences. For Oregon State and Washington State, this would be a simple choice as they have already been in talks with the American Athletic Conference and the Mountain West to possibly join their conferences in 2024, according to an Aug. 15 CBS article.
Stanford and Cal are in a tough spot as they do not have interest in joining the Mountain West or any Group of 5 conference and would prefer to join a Power 5 conference, according to the same ESPN report.
The two Bay Area schools are currently engaged in talks with the ACC to form a coast to coast conference with the likes of Syracuse, Duke and North Carolina University, according to a Wednesday ESPN article.
What gets lost in a lot of this is the toll realignment takes on the student athlete. Football is currently pushing many of these decisions, but it will have an impact on other sports.
Athletes in sports like softball and volleyball play multiple times a week will have to fly across the country on commercial flights in the middle of the week while juggling school work.
The entire regionality of college sports also goes away with realignment. Classic rivalries like Oregon vs Oregon State and Washington vs. Washington State are now gone.
The days where fans of teams who live a state over are now being replaced for a UCLA vs. Rutgers type of matchup.
But most of all, the moves of realignment are strongly signaling the move away from amateurism to full blown professional sports. What matters, and what has always mattered, is the bottom line for college sports. The time of playing for the love of the game is over.
Soon, the regulating body of the NCAA will be gone and conferences will rule themselves.
How does this affect SJSU?
College realignment comes full circle when we think about how this will affect SJSU.
If the Mountain West does take in Washington State and Oregon State, they will undoubtedly be the top dogs in the Mountain West.
Both schools have much better facilities and have built a recruiting map that has gotten them to a point where they are competing with the best of the PAC-12 as of late.
This means that the Spartans ascension could be halted with the arrival of two much bigger brands of teams coming to their conference.
On the other hand, SJSU could benefit from the movement of teams. If West Coast teams decide to go to a conference on the other side of the country, they will be looking for teams to play closer to home in their non-conference schedule.
SJSU could be a formidable opponent across all sports for former PAC-12 teams to face before they hit conference play, meaning more exposure for the Spartans.
Most of all, the realignment of teams has done SJSU a favor in solidifying the school’s relationship with the Mountain West. The Mountain West has smartly kept its teams intact and could emerge as the best Group of 5 conference in the country.
Current Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez is a former SJSU graduate and is unlikely to want to see her former school fall through the cracks after having a historic 2022 across all sports.
“SJSU is a proud member of the Mountain West Conference,” said SJSU Athletic Director Jeff Konya in a statement. “We [SJSU] just had one of our most successful athletic campaigns in history winning multiple championships and having several postseason opportunities for our sport teams, and student-athletes. In an ever changing intercollegiate athletics environment, it is incumbent on effective leaders to have a forward-thinking mindset and position their respective organization accordingly.”
