The Imminent Death of the Pac-12 Marks the Point of No Return for College Sports

Evolution turns everything into crabs. For whatever reason, a handful of unrelated crustacean species all wound up looking exactly the same, because flat and pinchy is apparently the optimal body structure for survival. The same has happened with North American pro sports—even though every league was founded under entirely different circumstances, in different regions of the country, across different eras with different business models. The NFL was founded in midsize Rust Belt cities with hopes of leeching off the massive popularity of college football; the American and National Leagues used to be competitors, with their own commissioners and rules; the Stanley Cup was originally given out to amateur Canadian clubs who had to challenge one another for the title. Now these leagues are essentially all the same—with 30 to 32 teams, spread across the continent, playing in most of the same cities. Same with the NBA, and MLS, all having evolved into the same pro sports crab.

Next up is college football, a sport built on the strength of regional rivalries that is now rapidly evolving into a national sport with just a few massive coast-to-coast conferences. Unfortunately, the Pac-12 will not be one of the lucky crustaceans. The 108-year-old regional league is doomed to die after losing most of its marquee members to the formerly midwestern Big Ten—now up to 18 teams, spread coast-to-coast.

Here’s the current state of affairs: Last year, the Pac-12’s two biggest programs, USC and UCLA, announced they were headed for the Big Ten in 2024. Last week, Colorado announced it will leave for its former home in the Big 12. This week, Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff pitched the remaining members on a contract with Apple TV that would pay schools roughly $20 million per school per year—roughly $60 million less than the Big Ten pays its schools, a gap that will only further increase as the latter league adds schools.

Kliavkoff might as well have told everybody to find a lifeboat. Oregon and Washington apparently considered staying in the Pac-12 until they saw how bad the Apple deal was. They’re now headed to the Big Ten. It’s unclear which is less accurate these days: Leagues with numerical names like “the Big Ten” that no longer reflect their number of teams, or leagues with geographic names like “the Southeastern Conference” that no longer accurately reflect the footprints of their conferences.

The Pac-12 is now wrong when it comes to both math and maps: It’s no longer 12 and has lost the Pacific to the Big Ten. It’s down to seven teams, and that number will certainly drop by the time you wake up tomorrow. Arizona and Arizona State seem likely to go to the Big 12 as a package deal, and Utah will likely join as well. That will leave behind four orphans: Cal, Stanford, Oregon State, and Washington State. Those four remaining schools essentially have to form some sort of alliance with the Mountain West, although it’s unclear whether they would drop down to join the smaller league or invite Mountain West schools up to create a prestige-less Pac-(insert a number here).

Either way, the Pac-12 is dead. It was not preordained that the conference was doomed to die—a decade or so ago, people thought the Pac-12 would be the league to add Texas and Oklahoma and form a superconference. The tables turned quickly, and for silly reasons. Ironically, the lame-duck Pac-12 is set to have a really awesome 2023 football season, with reigning Heisman winner Caleb Williams on USC and a really strong crop of contenders elsewhere in the conference. (Oregon State is gonna be really good! Sorry, you’re still getting ditched.)

The Pac-12’s cause of death is TV money. Of course, there’s a chicken or the egg question here. Did TV networks avoid giving the Pac-12 the megabucks media deals because the Pac-12 hadn’t won a football national championship since the 2004 season and hadn’t even gotten a participant into the four-team College Football Playoff since 2016? Or were Pac-12 football teams unable to compete because their TV contracts left each school tens of millions of dollars behind their counterparts in rival leagues?

The Pac-12’s poor management deserves some blame. Few conference commissioners failed as thoroughly in their jobs as former commissioner Larry Scott, who urged the league to bet big on the Pac-12 Networks and failed. (I literally cannot pay my current cable provider to get the Pac-12 Networks on my TV, and I am not alone.) College football fans celebrated “Pac-12 After Dark,” as an affectionate way to refer to the kooky high-scoring games buried deep in your channel guide well past midnight Eastern time—left unsaid was that no major TV network wanted to broadcast these games. Other conferences were playing in prime time while the Pac-12 built a cult following by playing at 1 a.m. on strange channels, like some weird public access program.

The Pac-12 is the biggest league to vanish off the map because of conference realignment. You can make fun of the league for calling itself the Conference of Champions—I sure have!!!—but it earned that with hundreds of championships, from John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty to near-total dominance in sports like tennis and swimming. Of course, most of these championships came in sports besides football—and football is all that matters financially. That’s made clear in the apparent irrelevance of Stanford—which has more all-time national championships than any other NCAA school, wins the all-sport NACDA Directors’ Cup virtually every year, produced Tiger Woods and Katie Ledecky, and quite frankly isn’t that bad in men’s basketball or football. But the Big Ten picked the four best football teams in the conference, and will now force Rutgers’ volleyball team to fly 3,000 miles to play in Seattle and Eugene back-to-back.

Conference realignment is not new. Teams have been switching leagues for decades. But this latest round is exceptionally bleak. Historically, the most important thing about college athletic conferences was their geography. Part of this was about convenience: It’s easier to schedule games against the team down the road. But it also fostered the environment that made college sports special. It’s about road-tripping to watch your squad play and having neighbors or coworkers or in-laws who root for That Other Team in your state—and will spend 364 days telling you about it if your team loses that one rivalry game every year.

Pro sports, on the other hand, are inherently national, not regional. It is rare for cities to have two teams in the same league. A crosstown rivalry is nice, and might even be feasible in metropoles like New York or Los Angeles. But everywhere else, it’s a bad strategy. Why split one city’s fans between two teams when you could spread out into new territories? Although there are geographic rivalries in pro sports, they’re less personal. A Yankees fan in New York doesn’t have to see Red Sox fans most days. It’s a hate you bust out a few times a year, instead of the simmering hate that powers college athletics.

The Pac-12 was a regional league. It was named after a region, and basically every team in the league had a clear and obvious rival. USC and UCLA played in the most aesthetically pleasing game of the year, red-and-gold against powder blue in the Rose Bowl or the Coliseum. Stanford and Cal played in the Big Game, a contest matching up some of the greatest, and nerdiest, players in football history. Oregon and Oregon State played for the perfect Platypus Trophy—half-Duck, half-Beaver, get it? The Apple Cup between Washington and Wazzu always seemed drunk, and Arizona and Arizona State waged football war in the desert.

The Oregon-Washington move to the Big Ten permanently kills two of those iconic rivalries—Oregon and Washington are leaving behind their natural rivals—and relegates Cal-Stanford to third-tier status in a left-behind league. It follows a trend, as by joining the SEC, Oklahoma is leaving Oklahoma State behind in the Big 12, killing off a game so chaotic it earned the nickname “Bedlam.”

In doing so, these teams that are leaving for bigger leagues or more TV money are permanently winning their rivalries, officially announcing themselves as bigger and better than the teams they share a state with. They will crowd out their ex-rivals, soaking up resources and talent and fans. Their pockets will be richer and their experience will be poorer: Instead of bragging about beating their rivals from down the road, they will play schools from the other side of the country and have nobody to talk to about it.

People bemoaning the modern state of college athletics (including many of the people who actively run universities, conferences, or the NCAA) have repeatedly harped on the growing professionalization of college athletics—and when they say this, they’re talking about how college athletes can now switch schools with more ease through the transfer portal or receive money for appearing in commercials. But the thing about college sports that reminds me most of the pros is the way the most powerful schools and conferences have reshaped the sport. The Big Ten and the SEC are locked in a battle to become the Junior NFL, they know the form they need to take, and they are clearly putting in the steps to get there. Evolution turns everything into crabs, and it’s shaped every pro league into the same creature. The Pac-12 is one of the species that didn’t survive.