The resurgent Pac-12 Conference ended Week 4 of the college football with reason for cautious optimism. Boise State’s 32-7 blowout of Western Michigan1 on the road propelled the Broncos into the Associated Press Top 25, marking the first time a Group of Six league member entered the poll this season.
Boise State’s entry into the Top 25 ostensibly signals the Broncos as frontrunners for the G6’s automatic berth into the College Football Playoff. That’s the good news for the Pac-12; the bad news is that the conference sustained some black eyes in other high-profile opportunities in Week 4.
Washington State built a 14-0 lead on former Pac-12 counterpart Arizona early, led 17-14 at halftime, but could not capitalize on the Wildcats’ initial struggles. The Cougars lost, 34-24.
Colorado State struggled defensively in a 59-45 shootout at UTSA, leaving the Pac 0-2 in matchups with the American’s Roadrunners after Texas State dropped a 31-26 heartbreaker in Week 2.
The ugliest performance of the week, however, was San Diego State — a program with the framework to be a banner-carrier for the new Pac-12 in this early seasons — losing a 41-16 laugher at Toledo.
Now, the Pac owns the best winning percentage of any G6 league head-to-head with the other five conferences. Utah State’s 21-10 defeat of Troy and Texas State knocking off North Texas are each meaningful victories that bolster the Pac-12’s overall standing in the Playoff race.
It’s much, much too soon to suggest the Pac-12 needs a marquee win against a power-conference opponent to assert what’s seemingly implied: That the new Pac-12 is closer to the ACC or Big 12 than it is the American, Mountain West or Sun Belt.
Considering how fast conference realignment moves, however, the Conference of Champions is facing a critical question about its future direction it may have to answer before this football season ends.
Press Break is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
Longtime Oregonian columnist John Canzano reported on UConn considering a football-only move to the Pac-12. The Huskies have been independent on the gridiron since the UConn athletic department opted to rejoin the Big East in the rest of its sports in 2020 — a move that signaled the university’s clear commitment to invest in its proven commodity of men’s basketball.
And indeed, when the Huskies returned to the top of college basketball three years later, winning the first of two straight national championships, UConn brass was vindicated.
Never mind being much stronger on the hardwood than the American; since UConn rejoined, Big East basketball has outranked the ACC, Big Ten and even Big 12 at different times per KenPom.com metrics.
With a broadcast rights deal of approximately $80 million annually, Big East basketball is also economically a power conference for all intents and purposes. I emphasis for all intents and purposes since designations of power and mid-major conferences in basketball is nebulous and somewhat subjective, certainly more so than in football, which has clear distinction to determine Playoff bids.
Since basketball’s glass ceiling isn’t as reinforced, I have previously suggested football’s outsiders could look to the Big East as an example and prioritize the mobility offered by hoops.
[
2022-23 College Basketball Epilogue, Part 6: More Conferences Should Aspire To Be The Big East
](https://pressbreak.substack.com/p/2022-23-college-basketball-epilogue-32b)
·
June 27, 2023
UConn’s completion of one of the most dominant NCAA Tournament runs since the formation of modern March Madness in 1985 scored a victory for traditionalists in the ongoing war for college sports’ future.
[
Read full story
](https://pressbreak.substack.com/p/2022-23-college-basketball-epilogue-32b)
Commensurate with UConn basketball’s resurgence as a national powerhouse, Huskies football saw a bump in its on-field results as an independent. The Huskies won nine games in both 2024 and 2025, and went bowling in three of the previous four seasons.
Of course, UConn’s rebound from a 1-11 finish in its first year of independence (2021) came under coach Jim Mora, who is now in the Pac-12 at Colorado State. Historically, since becoming a Div. I-A/Football Bowl Subdivision program in 2000, Huskies football has been decidedly middling and hardly an addition separating the Pac as a borderline power conference.
Pac-12 football will need to expand beyond eight members, however, and the prospective members it pursues will shape the conference’s identity for the foreseeable future.
Current American members UTSA, Tulane, North Texas and Memphis are all logical choices with their metropolitan locations and potential to be consistent winners in football.
Memphis landed a New Year’s Six Bowl bid in 2019; Tulane beat longtime pillar of the old Pac-12, USC in the 2022 season’s Sugar Bowl; and the Green Wave beat North Texas in last year’s American Athletic Conference Championship Game in what was effectively a Playoff play-in.
The same UTSA that is 2-0 against the Pac-12 in 2026, meanwhile, has qualified for bowl games in each of the last seasons. Since the program launched in 2011, UTSA football has routinely drawn healthy crowds of more than 30,000 to the Alamodome in downtown San Antonio.
Contrast that with Roadrunners basketball, which plays in a venue of roughly 2,800-seat capacity. UTSA has reached the NCAA Men’s Tournament four times in its history, most recently in 2011.
Things have been historically less dire on the hardwood at North Texas, but not drastically so: While the Mean Green scored a 1st-Round win in 2021 and were NIT champions in 2023, they have only qualified for the Big Dance four times in program history.
Tulane, meanwhile, hasn’t been part of the field of 64/68 since 1995.
Memphis is the outlier of the three, boasting a consistently successful basketball program that’s far more established than the peaks Tigers football has reached amid various valleys.
Indeed, Memphis is the only option of the four based on historic evidence that doesn’t drag down the profile of what looks very much like a basketball power conference.
And this iteration is indeed a power conference. Consider that in the last 20 years, teams from the Western United States have appeared in the NCAA Tournament’s National Championship Game a total of three times:
-
New Pac-12 member Gonzaga in 2017 and 2021
-
New Pac-12 member San Diego State in 2023
Add Memphis to the mix, and that would four members of primarily Western conferences to appear in the National Championship Game in the last two decades, all under the Pac-12 umbrella.
And it’s not just strength at the top. Eight of the nine members of relaunched Pac-12 basketball have been in the NCAA Tournament in the last decade, and six advanced to at least the Round of 32 since 2021.
Joining aforementioned national runners-up Gonzaga and San Diego State are Colorado State in 2025 (and coming a buzzer-beater shy of the Sweet 16 that postseason); Oregon State with its Elite Eight appearance in 2021; and Washington State moving on in 2024.
Utah State was the most recent of the new-look Pac-12 members to advance in the NCAA Tournament, doing so in this year’s edition. With the exceptions of Gonzaga — which has ascended to the status of nationally recognized powerhouse — and San Diego State, Utah State is the most consistent of the restructured league’s basketball programs.
What’s more, the Aggies — double-champions of the 2025-26 Mountain West Conference regular-season and Tournament — went on to give eventual West Region winner and former longtime Pac-12 standard-bearer Arizona all it could handle in the 2nd Round. The final score of 78-66 does not accurately reflect just how competitive this game was.
And, at the same time, Utah State drawing the No. 1 seed Arizona in just the 2nd Round stands as testament to the work the new Pac-12 has to do to approach the perception of its previous iteration.
The Aggies were much better than a No. 9 seed, with their final season KenPom ranking of No. 27 suggesting they were closer to a 6 or 7.
Having an established national banner-carrier such as Gonzaga, and in football’s case, Boise State, buoys perception of an entire conference.
Both sports have clear leaders to carry the banner, boasting decades of modern-day success and lineages of producing pros. In the case of that leading basketball program, however, the Pac has a leg up in that Gonzaga is consensusly recognized as a power program despite not being in a power conference.
In fact, the Zags’ previous home — the West Coast Conference — was routinely a one-bid league until Gonzaga was a decade into its ongoing run. The Bulldogs provided the proverbial rising tide that lifted the ships of Saint Mary’s, San Francisco and Santa Clara. All landed at-large NCAA Tournament invites are different times in the last half-decade; longer in Saint Mary’s case.
In terms of further bolstering its basketball membership, that leaves Mountain West member New Mexico as an obvious target for Pac-12 expansion. The Lobos have a deeply rooted track of success spanning multiple decades, and even in lean years, fans fill The Pit.
The flip-side, though, is the same precarious position Pac basketball might find itself in adding a member like UTSA for football purposes, only reversed.
While New Mexico football has experienced something of a rebound under Jason Eck, UNM has more often been among the very worst programs in college football since Rocky Long’s departure from Albuquerque almost 20 years ago.
[
Party Like It’s 1999: Ron Dayne, Varsity Blues, and New Mexico Football’s Jason Eck
](https://pressbreak.substack.com/p/party-like-its-1999-ron-dayne-varsity)
·
September 15, 2025
In the aftermath of New Mexico’s 35-10 blowout of UCLA on Friday, attention fixated pretty squarely on DeShaun Foster and the state of Bruins football. Foster’s firing on Sunday did nothing to quell that. But the more interesting story is Friday’s winner and the potential glimpse into college football’s future that first-year head coach Jason Eck’s Lobo…
[
Read full story
](https://pressbreak.substack.com/p/party-like-its-1999-ron-dayne-varsity)
There is no easy answer, whichever direction Pac-12 leadership takes.
And perhaps coupled with Oregon’s dominance of USC improving perception of Boise State’s Week 1 near-miss at Autzen Stadium.