LAS VEGAS — New Mexico basketball coach Richard Pitino was lying in bed late on Sept. 11.
“Doing what we all do too much and checking Twitter,” Pitino said. “I saw it and remember telling my wife, ‘This is not good.’ She was like, ‘Oh, go to bed, you’re worried about nonsense.’ I got up and didn’t sleep a lot.”
It wasn’t nonsense. Social media was suddenly alive with reports that San Diego State and three other Mountain West schools were joining a reformed Pac-12 starting in 2026-27. The only Division I football conference that had stayed intact for the past decade amid the constant churn of conference realignment was splintering.
“It pisses me off, if I’m being honest,” Pitino said. “I can’t understand why we’re breaking up. We could have done all this in the Mountain West, I really believe that. Now, you can say I’m bitter because we got left out. There is a little truth to that, for sure. But I don’t know why Boise State, Colorado State, San Diego State and Fresno State couldn’t have done this in this conference.
“I would have thought, how do we work together to work this thing out? It turned into ‘Game of Thrones’ all of a sudden, where everybody was stabbing everybody else in the back. I’m very disappointed in it, because I felt we should have been the marquee conference in the West. … I felt like this is a no-brainer to work together.”
It was a common sentiment Thursday at the Mountain West’s annual basketball media day in Las Vegas, the first public gathering since five members of the 12-team conference announced the move to the Pac-12. The surprise and disappointment was less that schools left — it happens all the time these days in college sports — but that they did so secretively, without first offering the Mountain West a chance to counter.
At the SDSU’s official announcement the following morning, president Adela de la Torre was asked why she and her departing counterparts didn’t first bargain with the Mountain West.
“I would say within that context we have to maintain our decision-making within a confidential manner,” de la Torre said. “I don’t think it’s like other business deals, where they’re offering me this, hey, what are you going to give me? This is really how presidents operate. You have to understand the constraints that we live in. … We did what we thought was important, and we got the job done.”
Except that’s not how other presidents have operated.
The Pac-12 next pursued four schools in the American Athletic Conference; they reportedly negotiated concessions and made a joint announcement that they’re all staying.
In 2018, when basketball power Gonzaga flirted with the Mountain West, it used that leverage to squeeze financial and scheduling incentives from the West Coast Conference.
Even after the five Mountain West schools left (Utah State later joined the other four), UNLV and Air Force turned down offers to go elsewhere after being offered bigger slices of the ensuing exit fees from the Pac-12 defectors.
“Certainly, I would have liked that opportunity,” Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez said Thursday in a candid conversation about the abrupt departures by SDSU, Boise State, Colorado State and Fresno State. “But I’ve always said schools have to do what’s best for their school, and if they felt this was the best thing for them, go get it. They truly felt this wasn’t the best thing for them, otherwise they would have come back to us.”
SDSU and Boise State, in particular, have aspired to greener conference pastures for more than a decade. In 2011, both announced they were leaving the Mountain West for the Big East in football while placing the rest of their sports in the Big West, only for the Big East to collapse before they got there. Boise State was granted a $1.8 million annual bonus from the Mountain West’s media rights contract to return, and SDSU was allowed back only at Boise State’s insistence.
Then two Junes ago, de la Torre sent a letter to Mountain West presidents that was interpreted by the conference as a notice of departure for the Pac-12. The Pac-12 imploded two months later, and SDSU was accepted back but only after covering the conference’s legal fees.
“It seems like they’ve always had one foot out the door,” one Mountain West source said.
Four days before news leaked that SDSU was leaving again for the Pac-12, Nevarez attended the football game at Snapdragon Stadium against Oregon State. She wore a bright red blazer in support of the Aztecs.
She spoke that night of conference unity, of not waiting for its top teams to be poached, of being proactive in incentivizing the marquee schools to stay. She spent the summer modeling systems of merit-based revenue distribution combined with minimum investment thresholds for the conference’s bottom-feeders with the threat of expulsion.
“That’s what I thought they wanted,” Nevarez said. “We had it all modeled out. It was close to the finish line.”
A meeting was scheduled with conference membership in late September to discuss the proposals and begin the process to embed them in their bylaws.
They never met.
On Sept. 1, the deadline passed to extend the football scheduling agreement for 2025 between the Mountain West and Pac-12 remnants Oregon State and Washington State. Negotiations had turned contentious, sources said, after the Pac-12 offered $6 million — less than half of what they paid for 12 games in 2024 — and the Mountain West countered with five times that.
“The spidey senses went off,” Nevarez said. “For about two weeks, it felt like something was up.”
The tip-off: Certain schools weren’t returning calls.
They played nice in the sandbox Thursday in Las Vegas, but the awkwardness was palpable. Mountain West media day is held in conjunction with the WCC, which still has Gonzaga for two more years plus Oregon State and Washington State until the resurrected Pac-12 launches in 2026.
“Yeah, it’s hard,” said Steve Alford, entering his sixth season at Nevada after spending six at New Mexico. “For the vast majority of this time, the Mountain West has been able to keep everybody together, which has been great. Now we’ve obviously got movement.”
“I think collaborative effort would have been great, but it didn’t happen,” said San Jose State coach Tim Miles, another Mountain West veteran who also spent time at Colorado State. “Now it feels like we’ve fractured the Mountain West and fractured the WCC, and I don’t know how good the Pac-12 will be.
“Will it be as good as what the Mountain West even was? I don’t know. When I say I don’t know, it’s not that I don’t think so but it’s not obvious to me.”
The Pac-12, on balance, has the better football and men’s basketball programs. The finances could be an equalizer, though.
The five teams jumping from the Mountain West likely will have larger annual distributions from the Pac-12 media rights contract, but they’ll be saddled with paying off an estimated $18 million each in exit fees. Those left behind in the Mountain West could see a dip in media rights, but an influx of cash from $90 million in exit fees plus another $55 million in “poaching” fees owed (and disputed legally) by the Pac-12 as part of the scheduling agreement.
Conferences are required to have eight full members to be included in the lucrative College Football Playoff, and the Mountain West achieved that by adding UTEP and then elevating Hawaii from football only to all sports.
The Pac-12 added an eighth school in Gonzaga but still needs at least one more full member because the Bulldogs don’t play football.
On the surface, it’s an odd fit — seven large public institutions with enrollments between 21,000 and 33,000 … and a private Jesuit school with 5,000. In this brave, new world of college athletics, it makes perfect sense.
Gonzaga is expected to make double or even triple what it did from the WCC, where its revenues were largely contingent on how it performed in the NCAA Tournament.
“It brings financial stability to the university and the athletic department with finally getting some sort of media deal,” Bulldogs coach Mark Few said. “That’s what this whole thing is about right now. Players need to get paid. Everybody, whether you like it or not, has to think financially about how you’re doing things instead of taking a socialistic point of view.
“You’ve got to get serious, and you’re got to do what you’ve got to do.”
WCC commissioner Stu Jackson said Gonzaga president Thayne McCulloh kept him apprised on its talks with the Big 12 and Pac-12. Six years ago, the WCC made concessions to keep Gonzaga, most notably letting the Zags keep the bulk of their NCAA Tournament units instead of distributing them evenly.
This time, the money was too big. The Pac-12 reportedly offered Gonzaga between a half and full share, even though the school doesn’t play football.
“By the time I got the call from president McCulloh on that Sunday night, it was not a surprise,” Jackson said. “The money was beyond the scope of what we could offer. That was made very clear to me when I asked if there was anything we could do. I appreciated the candid answer, I respect it, and my response was: ‘Congratulations.’”
Some expect the Pac-12 to make another run at AAC schools with a more lucrative financial package. The question becomes whether it’s worth subjecting athletes to regular cross-country travel to a league concentrated exclusively in the Pacific and Mountain time zones.
“The issue in the West is we just don’t have the population of schools,” Nevarez said. “There are very few places to go. Divide the market out here, and it’s difficult. In my heart, I believe the more we can come together in the West, the better.”
Come together, as in merge?
The subject is addressed in the football scheduling agreement between the Mountain West and Pac-12.
“The Parties will negotiate in good faith,” it states, “the consummation, as promptly as reasonably practicable, of a definitive transaction pursuant to which all MWC member institutions join Pac-12 as Pac-12 member institutions with no MWC exit fee payable.”
Many, New Mexico’s Pitino among them, assumed this would be the ultimate outcome. Now you have a pair of competing eight-team conferences with few viable options in the West to grow beyond that.
And one, pending legal proceedings, could pay the other as much as $155 million in exit and poaching fees for the privilege.
“I would always be open to that (merger) discussion, I really would,” Nevarez said. “It wouldn’t be easy and I don’t think it’s probable, but anything is possible in this environment. It would just be an unwinding of things.
“It would certainly be complex, but it has to start with a will (from the Pac-12) and I don’t feel that’s there.”