So, what now?
After the college football landscape was rocked on Thursday with USC and UCLA moving to the Big Ten in 2024, the Pac-12 Conference is in a state of chaos. We can speculative for hours about what’s next for the Pac, but there’s no doubt money will be lost without two of its biggest schools. A merger with the Mountain West is possible, or maybe it will simply run with 10 teams. In both scenarios, the grass doesn’t seem too green.
The Pac-12’s recent downfall could even produce a mass exodus, which I believe is most likely. If Colorado wants to thrive, there’s no way that remaining in a worsened Pac-12 is healthy.
Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News, who was first to break the UCLA-USC development, proposed that CU could link up with a few other nearby Pac-12 schools and apply for the Big 12:
Arizona and Arizona State joined the Pac-12 in 1978, while Utah and Colorado came aboard in 2011.
Without the connection to Southern California provided by USC and UCLA, the quartet could look for options together.
The best of those might be the Big 12, to create a league that owns the Central and Mountain Time Zones.
But this development is extremely damaging for all four of those schools given their reliance on Southern California for recruiting and on the L.A. schools as prime sources of TV revenue.
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