In late July, we told you that if the Arizona schools left the Pac-12, that was the ballgame. It’s true that Oregon and Washington left the Pac-12 on Friday, but they left because they could see the conference was crumbling, in part because Arizona was almost out the door and Arizona State wasn’t far behind.
Now it’s official: Arizona is moving to the Big 12. The Pac-12 has four schools left: Stanford, Cal, Oregon State and Washington State.
We noted that the “Arizona schools need to have a presence in Texas, not just California, for recruiting. Arizona State football, under former coach Todd Graham a decade ago, made it a point to recruit the state of Texas. The Arizona schools would not be out of place in the Texas-anchored Big 12 (which has several schools in the state). USC in the Big Ten is a weird geographical reality, but the Arizona schools in the Big 12 would feel relatively natural by comparison.”
Now they’re in the Big 12.
X, formerly known as Twitter, was the place to be when these extraordinary events became official on a Friday we will remember for a long time.
Here we go: