Surprise!
San Diego State is headed to the Pac-12 after all.
The university is leaving the Mountain West to join Oregon State and Washington State in all sports in a reformed Pac-12 starting in 2026-27, according to multiple reports confirmed by conference sources.
Yahoo Sports first reported the news late Wednesday night. A formal announcement from the university, followed by a news conference, is expected Thursday morning.
Three other Mountain West members will go with the Aztecs: Boise State, Colorado State and Fresno State.
That would get the Pac-12 to six schools, two shy of the NCAA minimum of eight. Oregon State and Washington State received a two-year waiver that expires after 2025-26.
It won’t be cheap. The current football scheduling alliance with the Mountain West requires Oregon State and Washington State to pay withdrawal or “poaching” fees starting at $10 million for one school, rising to $43 million for four.
In addition, each university is on the hook for exit fees to the Mountain West that, with more than one year’s notice of departure, amount to three times the annual distribution, which is expected to be about $6.5 million per school for 2024-25. That brings the total exit fee to an estimated $20 million.
There were murmurs over the summer that OSU and WSU were setting aside part of their war chest from the dissolution of the Pac-12 to help attract new members. It’s expected that they would pay the poaching fees for the four schools, but the Mountain West defectors would be responsible for their individual exit fees.
In all, the Mountain West stands to make $123 million, a sizeable haul for a conference that gets less than half of that annually from its media rights contract. But it’s also losing its two marquee members, SDSU and Boise State, plus two others in the upper tier.
The big losers are UNLV and New Mexico. The Rebels have a rich basketball history (reaching four Final Fours and winning the national title in 1990) and are vastly improved in football, with upgraded campus facilities and a new NFL stadium for home games. New Mexico continues to struggle in football but arguably has the most resources in the conference in basketball.
Air Force nearly left a few years ago to join the American Athletic Conference, where the other two service academies play football, and will have little holding it back now. That would leave the Mountain West with seven members in football, one shy of the NCAA-mandated minimum, at a time when its current media rights deal is expiring. In basketball, it would have only six members since Hawaii plays in the Big West.
The 6-Pac will spend the coming months searching for at least two more members to get to eight, although industry insiders expect them to shoot for nine or 10. Cal, Stanford and SMU are possibilities if Florida State and Clemson prevail in their legal battle to leave the ACC and the conference disintegrates. Other candidates include current AAC members such as Memphis, Tulsa, North Texas and UTSA.
This technically is not the first time SDSU has left the Mountain West.
It did with Boise State for the Big East in 2012, only for the Big East to collapse as a football league and both teams to slink back. SDSU nearly left again last June, thinking it would secure an invitation to the Pac-12, but 10 members of the conference scattered to the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC, and the Aztecs remained in the Mountain West.
This time, it appears the Aztecs finally are leaving.
Originally Published: