Predicting what an 18-team Pac-12/Big 12 merger might look like

The Pac-12 merging with the Big 12 seems like a potentially likely outcome in this conference realignment. Here’s what that might look like…

The ever-changing landscape of the college football world is changing more quickly than usual of late.

After USC and UCLA announced last week that they would leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, the world of college athletics has been thrown into a tizzy, scrambling to figure out what conferences are going to look like in a matter of years, and which teams are going to be playing where.

At first, it looked as if the Oregon Ducks were going to be among the teams likely to leave the Pac-12 and follow the Los Angeles schools to the Big Ten. Over the past few days, though, it seems there’s a better chance the Ducks either stand pat in the Pac-12 or potentially merge with the ACC or Big 12. We will likely know more in the coming days or weeks.

One of the intriguing options that we’ve come across, though, is a merger between the Big 12 and the Pac-12. In this scenario, some of the top schools from the Pac-12 would join the Big-12 and form what would be a less powerful superconference, but a superconference nonetheless. This is what it would look like, in our minds: