September 15, 2024
Pac-12 moves open the door to possibilities
Bold moves breathes new life into Conference of Champions
Whether the Pac-12 Conference is ultimately resurrected in a form that feels familiar and comforting, the conference’s move to add four teams from the Mountain West this week, beginning with the 2026-27 season, opens the door to something that didn’t exist just days ago.
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Possibilities.
Possibilities that the Pac-12 can be reconstituted as something completely new.
Possibilities that the Pac-12 can open the door to someday welcoming back some of the schools — we’re talking about you, Stanford and Cal (and maybe Utah) — that left reluctantly after the implosion of 2023.
Possibilities that maintain the brand for the next iteration of college sports.
Possibilities that for sports other than football, some geographical common sense could exist again.
Possibilities that the Pac-12 could still be a breeding ground for the U.S. Olympic teams that so relied on the West Coast’s premier conference as its farm system.
Possibilities that Oregon State and Washington State — the land-grant institutions left behind in what turned out to be a devastating sequence of events — can put themselves in the driver’s seat to determine a prosperous future.
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On paper, commissioner Teresa Gould brought in four teams from a lesser conference to rebuild a conference that might sit just outside the Power 4. But what Gould actually did was give the Pac-12 a chance not only to live, but to thrive and innovate.
Gould said Sunday to The Next that her phone has exploded with text messages from former Pac-12 athletes and coaches — including retired Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer — who are overjoyed to see that the conference will move forward.
Gould said that while on its face, football is a “driver” in conversations about the future makeup of the conference, “Our plans are centered around the competitive experience of our student-athletes. Both Washington State and Oregon State have excelled at the highest level in many sports — women’s basketball, men’s basketball, baseball, Olympic sports — and competitive excellence has to be a consideration when we think about who are the next wave of invitees.”
That is welcome news after watching what happened at Oregon State and Washington State at the end of last season, particularly in Corvallis, where the consequences of the Pac-12 implosion were so very evident.
Just days after making a run to the Elite Eight with a roster of players that would have largely returned next season to do it again, Scott Rueck’s program was gutted by transfers, who faced the unknown in terms of where OSU and WSU would land, and then weren’t willing stick around for the Beavers’ transition into the West Coast Conference.
Eight players left the program, including starters Talia von Oelhoffen (USC), Raegan Beers (Oklahoma), Donovyn Hunter (TCU) and Timea Gardiner (UCLA).
Guards A.J. Marotte and Kennedie Shuler, forwards Kelsey Reed, Sela Heide and Susana Yepes have stayed. Rueck added Brazilian guard Catarina Ferreira from Brazil, who transferred from Baylor; Spanish wing Lucia Navarro from Florida State; and a Danish player in 6-foot-5 post Elisa Mehyar.
Rueck, who has a contract through 2031, said himself in May that he has not considered leaving his alma mater.
“I love it here. I don’t want to leave here,” Rueck said in May. “It’d be foolish to never say never because I would have told you that George Fox, I was never looking to leave there… I love my job.”
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Washington State, meanwhile, would lose centerpiece Charlisse Leger-Walker, who missed the end of the season with a knee injury, but transferred to play her final collegiate season at UCLA.
The international route for filling rosters is a familiar one to Cougars’ coach Kamie Ethridge and one that Rueck is using to rebuild his program.
From a women’s basketball perspective, adding these programs will be a small competitive upgrade from the WCC.
Adding San Diego State, Fresno State, Colorado State and Boise State to the Pac-12 ranks adds a group of women’s basketball programs that have had fleeting success on a national scope.
San Diego State has made nine NCAA appearances (including a Sweet 16 run in 2010), but none since 2012. Fresno State has made the NCAA Tournament seven times (last in 2014) but has never won a game. Colorado State has reached the NCAA Tournament six times (last in 2016), and it reached the Sweet 16 in 1999. Boise State has made six NCAA appearances and four since 2015, losing to Oregon State in overtime in the first round in 2019.
But what’s important is not just who is confirmed to be joining the Pac-12; it’s who else might be interested in joining or re-joining. Getting Stanford and Cal back from the ACC — an intriguing but still remote possibility given the schools’ commitment to the ACC through 2036 — would up the ante exponentially.
Other programs reportedly in consideration are Tulane and Memphis. And Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes said Saturday that “bunches” of schools are making phone calls to express their interest in joining the Conference of Champions.
“We need to be thinking ahead of the curve,” Gould said. “What does the structure of collegiate athletics look like in the next 3-4 years, and do we have an opportunity to get in front of that? We want to be ahead of the curve.
“Ideating about all of this is invigorating, and it is exciting. A lot of people think there is a better way to do this, but the harder part is getting buy-in from the right people. We need buy-in to pursue ideas that are new and different in terms of conference structures and alignments. It’s looked the same for a long time. Will people be willing to think about the future differently? We will find out.”
In the meantime, what Gould, Oregon State and Washington State did with their big move last week was create some very intriguing possibilities.
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Written by Michelle Smith
Michelle Smith has covered women's basketball nationally for nearly three decades. Smith has worked for ESPN.com, The Athletic, the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as Pac-12.com and WNBA.com. She was named to the Alameda County Women's Hall of Fame in 2015, is the 2017 recipient of the Jake Wade Media Award from the Collegiate Sports Information Directors Association (CoSIDA) and was named the Mel Greenberg Media Award winner by the WBCA in 2019.
