You can officially put a bow on the PAC 12.
Oregon State and Washington State have come to an agreement in principle with the 10 departing Pac-12 universities that will end ongoing litigation related to control of the conference, the 12 universities announced Thursday.
The agreement comes in the wake of the Washington state Supreme Court’s decision last week not to review a lower court’s decision that granted control of the Pac-12 board of directors to OSU and WSU.
As part of the agreement, the 10 departing schools will forfeit an undisclosed portion of revenue distributions over the rest of the 2023-24 school year and have provided “specific guarantees against potential future liabilities.”
“In September, as the two remaining members of the Pac-12 Conference, Oregon State University and Washington State University were forced to act swiftly to protect the future viability of the Pac-12. Thanks to the determination and strength of Beaver Nation and Cougar Nation and the excellence of our student-athletes, coaches and staff, we are now closer to achieving our goal,” OSU president Jayathi Murthy and WSU president Kirk Schultz said in a joint statement. “Today’s news marks a huge victory for our universities and a significant step toward stabilizing the Pac-12 Conference and preserving its 108-year legacy.”
The Pac-12 will retain all its assets and future revenues, the presidents added.
This development allows all involved parties to move forward and, for OSU and WSU in particular, a better sense of what their financial picture will look like as they begin the process to rebuild the Pac-12.
In another statement, the departing schools said they’ll work out the final details in the coming days.
“For now, we are grateful to resolve this dispute and look forward to competing against each other over the next several months in the Pac-12,” their statement said.
Earlier this month, OSU and WSU announced it had come to a scheduling agreement with the Mountain West Conference to play six MWC opponents in football during the 2024 season. They are also close to finalizing an affiliate agreement with the West Coast Conference to host most of its other sports, most notably men’s and women’s basketball. It’s possible the agreement with the WCC could be announced as early as this week, sources told ESPN.
Neither of those arrangements are expected to last beyond two seasons, while the OSU and WSU keep the Pac-12 afloat.
See here and here for some background. I daresay the money was a bigger deal for OSU and WSU than it was for the departing schools.
As that story notes, OSU and WSU have a new temporary home, for some of their sports.
The latest bend to conference realignment has popped in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon State and Washington State will join the West Coast Conference as affiliate members and play league games — with the exception of football and baseball — against WCC schools for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons.
The WCC’s presidents and athletic directors voted and unanimously approved the measure Thursday morning, a source said, and the conference officially announced the addition of Oregon State and Washington State on Friday.
For men’s and women’s basketball, this means the nine-school WCC will enlarge to 11 teams for the next two seasons — increasing the conference’s appeal and scheduling power in the process.
“The WCC has a great history of national success, and we look forward to continued excellence with the addition of Oregon State and Washington State as affiliate members of the Conference,” WCC commissioner Stu Jackson said in a statement. “These are two prestigious institutions with a robust athletics profile that each embody the intrinsic values of the WCC. The Conference and its member institutions provide valuable opportunities in recruiting, scheduling, broadcast exposure and an exceptional student-athlete experience. OSU’s and WSU’s institutional support and passionate fan bases will only enhance this experience across the Conference.”
In football, Oregon State and Washington State already have a separate agreement in place for 2024 with the Mountain West. (The WCC does not sponsor football.) Other sports that will play other the WCC tent for the next two years include softball, volleyball, cross country, golf, soccer and tennis.
Industry speculation over the past two months centered around the idea that OSU and WSU would follow football’s lead and eventually link with the Mountain West in all sports. But logistical and ongoing legal concerns have combined to make a move in basketball and non-revenue sports difficult at this time, sources said.
In becoming WCC members from July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2026, Oregon State and Wazzu will compete for regular-season and postseason WCC titles. That means they’re eligible for automatic-qualifier status for NCAA championship events, most notably basketball’s NCAA Tournament.
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What happens with OSU and WSU beyond the spring of 2026 is foggy. Sources told CBS Sports the Mountain West would have interest in a long-term partnership with the two as full members once everything legal and financial is sorted out in the months/years to come with the fallout of the Pac-12. As it stands in football for 2024, the schools won’t be eligible for the Mountain West championship game. Unlike basketball and other sports, they will essentially compete as independents in the new 12-team College Football Playoff and — same as Notre Dame — cannot qualify for a first-round bye by being ranked in the top four.
In baseball, Oregon State is a strong enough program that it intends to play as an independent in the near-term, sources said, with Washington State doing the same.
Kind of a fascinating situation, and it’s probably wise for the two schools to keep some options open. Who even knows what the landscape might look like in two years? As far as baseball goes, they have other options.
Adding Oregon State and Washington State would probably make the WCC into a three-bid league. But the strongest mid-major conference in the area, or at least the most storied, is the Big West. That’s the home of Fullerton, Long Beach State, UC-Santa Barbara, and UC-Irvine. My original proposal back in August was for Oregon State and Wazzu to join with these Big West powers to form a sort of independent baseball-only super-conference. Keeping the WCC plan on the back burner leaves that option on the table; if such a baseball-only conference were to take shape, that could serve as a blueprint for schools that are more successful in baseball than football.
That’s about to be very relevant in the ACC. Since the last round of realignment chatter, Florida State’s football team went undefeated, but lost its starting quarterback to injury. The College Football Playoff selection committee then elevated Texas and Alabama, both one-loss conference champions, to the playoff ahead of FSU. The reason being that while the Seminoles might have accomplished more by going undefeated, Texas and Alabama are better teams.
People in Tallahassee are pissed. And they have a point; is the ACC really a power conference if the undefeated champion can be passed over for a playoff spot in favor of teams that took losses? And if not, why should Florida State — a program with resources, history, and ambition to match anyone in college football — stick around?
The technical reason: The ACC owns FSU’s media rights until 2036. The Florida State board of trustees is now contemplating avenues for getting out of that agreement. There’s no precedent for a legal challenge to a grant of rights, but there is also no contract so ironclad that a sufficiently angry group of southern college football boosters can’t find a way to void it. It’s in the Constitution.
If FSU does manage to escape, that’d be the beginning of the end of the ACC as a football conference. Clemson’s recent run of dominance notwithstanding, FSU is the motivating ACC football power. If the Seminoles leave, Clemson could tag along. Even if that doesn’t happen, we’re seeing the first signs of cracking in the rock that William C. Swinney has built his program on. What is an ACC without FSU or a dominant Clemson?
Not much, in football terms, just a venue for future state legislators to go 8-4 and get stomped by SEC opposition in the Gator Bowl. In baseball, Clemson and FSU are huge programs, but they don’t prop the conference up. Virginia, North Carolina, Wake Forest, Miami, Louisville, and NC State are all huge programs in their own right, and they’d make up one of the best leagues in college baseball on their own. Plus Stanford, which just went to the College World Series, is in the conference now too.
Whatever legal pretext Florida State finds to try to force its way out of the ACC, the league isn’t going to dissolve overnight. That gives the other ACC schools time to find a solution, whether that’s to stay the course or get more creative. More than that, Oregon State is now a test case for what happens to a major college baseball program when its conference up and vanishes. If the Pac-12 orphans do manage to pioneer a baseball-only power conference, ACC baseball could use that as a blueprint. The remaining teams could lose Florida State and barely even notice — at least on the baseball field.
As author Michael Baumann has pointed out before, realignment is an entirely football-driven process. This has not only been bad for some major basketball programs, at least in terms of scheduling and travel and the loss of traditional rivals, it’s also been bad for women’s sports and baseball and other “non-revenue” programs. One possible direction that some schools could choose to take for the sake of their powerhouse baseball teams is having them in separate conferences, ones that cater to that sport and its programs, than the football teams. With every new machination, that seems less and less farfetched.
And since we mentioned FSU and the ACC.
The Florida State board of trustees voted unanimously Friday to sue the ACC to challenge the legality of the league’s grant of rights and its $130 million withdrawal fee, a necessary first step to plot the school’s future and potential exit from the conference.
The 38-page lawsuit, filed in Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee, Florida, seeks a declaratory judgment against the ACC to void the grant of rights and withdrawal fee as “unreasonable restraints of trade in the state of Florida and not enforceable in their entirety against Florida State.”
The university alleges “chronic fiduciary mismanagement and bad faith” in the way the ACC has handled its multimedia rights agreements and undermined its members’ revenue opportunities. Florida State is also accusing the ACC of breach of contract and failure to perform.
“I believe this board has been left no choice but to challenge the legitimacy of the ACC grant of rights and its severe withdrawal penalties,” board chair Peter Collins said. “None of us like being in this position. However, I believe that we have exhausted all possible remedies within the conference and we must do what we believe is best for Florida State not only in the short term but in the long term.”
Florida State is now in unprecedented territory. No school has ever challenged a grant of rights in court.
ACC officials have previously used the word “ironclad” to describe the document, and that has been the operating assumption from leagues across the country — believing the language in the document is so rigid it would prevent schools from leaving. But because no school has ever challenged the document in court, nobody actually knows whether it is, indeed, as ironclad as described.
Who knows what will happen there. I’m sure that the president and athletic director at Stanford and Cal are all thinking “Jesus Christ, not this shit again” right about now. Keep your seat belts fastened, the ride will continue to be wild.