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‘WEST COAST FOOTBALL-WHAT IS NEXT?”
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College football preseason camps will open within weeks, and this will be a shockingly different look for these conferences.

There is no Pac 12-any longer, and Oregon State and Washington State have 2-years to rebuild West Coast football.

The 10-teams who exited the Pac 12, left behind ($255M) in the conference office coffers to be used for the future of the league.

Oregon State-Washington State have jointly taken control of the league office and that money left behind with the defection of USC-UCLA, the Bay Area schools who went to the ACC, the late night defection of Oregon and Washington, and the 4-corner schools who wound up in the Big 12.

OSU-WSU agreed to take (40M) each as a share for the damaged losses from the TV contract that went away.

It means there is (175M) left to be spent for the 6-teams who might be joining the league in time for the 2026 football season.  The general consensus is the league will return as the Pac 8, and get accreditation from the NCAA.

OSU-WSU want to rebuild the Pac 8-brand, but the biggest discussion point is whether bringing in 6-schools from the Mountain West Conference actually rebuilds that brand.  Or are they MWC-2, without big impact in the Media Contract world.

The MWC-TV deal expires after the 2025 season, meaning San Diego State-Boise State and others become college football-basketball free agents.  The whopping 18-to-36 M exit fees will likely go away.

But when that happens a true set of questions have to be answered.  No one in the MWC has an athletic budget equal to what the Pac 12-teams spend.  Not one of the MWC schools has the NIL pot of gold to use to lure players.

Of course I might add, that the way the NIL operates could be radically changed too if the NCAA is given control of funding and distribution.  Stay tuned for that part of the story.

Joining the PAC would be a recruiting boom for the Aztecs and Boise, with its recruiting ties up and down the West Coast.  Would it mean the same for Fresno State or UNLV or Colorado State or the Air Force?

What happens if the Cal-Stanford trip to the ACC turns into a disaster and they opt out in a couple of years, because they cannot compete athletically or maybe financially?  What if they come back and the Pac 2-becomes 4-and how does that impact the MWC schools available?

What if UCLA to the Big 10-becomes a fiasco on and off the field?  What if the TV contracts change, and the 50-60M per year payouts to all schools, no longer exists?

What happens if a 24-team ‘Super Conference’ for football is born and cherry picks top teams from each conference, does that change the makeup of the rest of the leagues?

it is hard to believe what we have seen happen here to a league that had been in place since 1915.  What USC-UCLA did to tradition and loyalty.  What Oregon-Washington felt they had to do after the league failed to get a quality TV contract.

Equally hard to understand how the Council of Presidents sat around the table and never told each other their plans to ‘take the money and run’ from everyone else.  And to understand the horrid mistakes made in the hiring of the last two commissioners.

Aztecs football is not what Aztecs basketball has become, a true national program.  They have been exceptional in MWC football, but how would they hold up if it was Pac 8-football.  It takes numbers of bluechippers and big time NIL money to run with the Beavers-Cougars.

So as a vibrant head coach Sean Lewis takes over San Diego State, there is so much unknown out there.  SDSU has so many new transfers coming in, so many who defected out, and a brand new-radically different playbook.  No one knows how this plays out in year 1-of Aztecs Fast or Air Aztecs or whatever the brand name becomes.

It’s like walking down a dark stairwell and the hope you don’t stumble and fall.  It feels like everyone in the MWC could slip into a dark football basement.

West Coast football.  Who knows what it looks like by 2026.  So many unanswered questions.

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