The Pac-12 is officially back: What to know about the revamped league

It looks different, but the Pac-12 is officially back.

Two years after being left in the dust by conference realignment, the new-look Pac-12 launched on Wednesday with nine full-time members – including the WSU Cougars and Gonzaga Bulldogs.

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Here’s what to know about the new iteration of one of college sports’ longest-standing leagues.

How we got here

The disintegration of the Pac-12 began in June 2022, when UCLA and USC sent shockwaves through the college sports landscape by announcing plans to move to the Big Ten.

Things then completely fell apart in August 2023, when the UW Huskies and Oregon also announced they were moving to the Big Ten, followed almost immediately by Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah announcing their move to the Big 12. Less than a month later, Cal and Stanford announced a cross-country move to the Atlantic Coast Conference.

By the beginning of the 2024-25 school year, Washington State and Oregon State were the only remaining schools in the Pac-12 – a league that began more than a century ago as the Pacific Coast Conference back in 1915.

WSU and Oregon State ended up winning a legal battle to retain control of the Pac-12 and its assets, and the “Pac-2” schools spent the past two years working to rebuild the conference. And they succeeded, recruiting seven new full-time members to join the league – five from the Mountain West Conference, one from the West Coast Conference and one from the Sun Belt Conference.

The full-time members

The revamped Pac-12 now has nine full-time members, including eight football-playing schools. The lone full-time member that doesn’t play football is Gonzaga. Here are the nine schools and what conference they came from:

• Washington State (Pac-12)
• Oregon State (Pac-12)
• Gonzaga (West Coast)
• Boise State (Mountain West)
• Colorado State (Mountain West)
• Fresno State (Mountain West)
• San Diego State (Mountain West)
• Utah State (Mountain West)
• Texas State (Sun Belt)

The affiliate members

The league also includes 12 new affiliate members across five sports:

• Baseball – Dallas Baptist
• Men’s soccer – Cal Baptist, Cal Poly, UC Riverside, UC San Diego
• Women’s gymnastics – Southern Utah
• Women’s swimming – Cal Baptist
• Wrestling – Air Force, Northern Colorado, North Dakota State, Northern Illinois, South Dakota State

The Pac-12’s spot in the conference hierarchy

The new Pac-12 isn’t as strong as the old version. But outside of the power conferences, the new Pac-12 has a chance to be the next-best league in both football and men’s basketball.

In football, the Pac-12 should be well positioned to contend for the automatic College Football Playoff bid that goes to the highest-ranked conference champion from the Group of Six conferences (the Pac-12, the American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, the Mid-American Conference, the Mountain West and the Sun Belt). Over the past five seasons, six of the Pac-12’s eight football programs have had at least one year-end finish in the Associated Press Top 25 poll.

And in men’s basketball, the Pac-12 could have a strong case as the nation’s best mid-major conference. Over the past five seasons, seven of the Pac-12’s nine men’s basketball programs have reached the NCAA Tournament. That includes a pair of national runner-up finishes, with perennial powerhouse Gonzaga reaching the 2021 national championship game and San Diego State reaching the 2023 national title game.

A return to Vegas for hoops

The Pac-12 also announced Wednesday that the conference tournaments for men’s and women’s basketball will be held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas for the next two seasons.

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