Over the weekend I posted this Las Vegas Review-Journal article regarding the Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff advising that the various schools have reached out to the Pac-12 and that they’ve taken meetings with the institutions who are interested.
Review-Journal: Is there anything you can tell us about realignment and its impact on the Pac-12?
Kliavkoff: “I think we’re really, really happy with the 12 that we have in the league. The opportunity to revisit that following Texas and Oklahoma has certainly presented itself. I am not actively poaching any school or convincing anyone to leave their existing conference, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t listening to schools that wanted to go in the Pac-12, and we’ve had a lot of them reach out. Probably all of the ones you would expect and several you’d be surprised by.
“We have taken initial meetings with everyone that has expressed an interest. We have a working group … who are together deciding on what to recommend … At the end of the day, they’ll make the decision about whether or not to offer admission to the Pac-12 to any other schools.”
Review-Journal: Do you have a deadline?
Kliavkoff: “There’s no hard deadline related to any of this, but I would say I don’t think it’s good for college athletics given the vibration that’s going on as a result of the Texas and Oklahoma news. The quicker we can dampen that vibration, the better. We will have a decision on whether we intend to expand or not in the next couple of weeks.”
That all sounds pretty reasonable and I think the “couple of weeks” sounds about right. I’m still in favor of the Pac-12, but if there has to be a way out, I’d be good with the following (not ideal, but not sure there are other options).
I also ran across this Twitter thread (me finding out about it involves a Slack channel and some additional clicks on things), but my guess would be that option two if the Pac-12 doesn’t send invites would be to just grow the Big 12.
— Joel (@SDSU_Alum2003) August 19, 2021
It seems likely that adding BYU is the biggest fish out there, and then rounding out the conference with teams on the west coast and then teams on the east coast makes some sense. There would, at the very least, be a national footprint pretty much all over the place and at the very least, this would be a steallar basketball conference and a very good football conference.