Pete Thamel considers what comes next for Pac-12 after losing eight schools to realignment

On Friday, we saw the Pac-12 ripped apart at the seams as five more teams agreed to leave the league in the wake of Colorado’s recent decision to jump ship, which came roughly a year after USC and UCLA inked deals to move on as well. When the dust settled on the evening of Aug. 4, there were just four programs left as part of the Pac-12 beyond the upcoming school year: Oregon State, Stanford, California and Washington State.

So, what’s next for those guys and the Pac-12 as a whole? If you want answers, ESPN’s Pete Thamel has them. Although any remaining Pac-12 fans be not be able to handle the harsh truth of how difficult it may be for the Pac-12 to actually turn this ship around.

“I think the knee-jerk fan reaction [is to] say ‘Oh, they just go grab a couple of Mountain West schools.’ That’s sort of how the fiefdom of college athletics conferences tends to work,” said Thamel of the conference’s options after yesterday’s max exodus. However, the Mountain West has some prohibitors in place to keep that sort of pillaging from happening to their own league.

“But credit Mountain West leadership, they have very, very punitive exit fees for any of their schools to leave before 2025,” added Thamel. “And the problem for the Pac-12 is their TV contract ends after this 2023 football season. So next year, that league will really only have four football teams, so they can’t pay $32 million per school to add others.”

The question of whether the Pac-12 can swipe teams from the Mountain West very quickly becomes financial, where the Pac-12 is hurting bad as they struggled to get a TV deal in place, still have debt from an old TV deal, and now have just four teams. Those factors are reason for Pete Thamel to believe that a merger between the Mountain West and Pac-12 is more likely than the Pac-12 just simply taking some MW teams — because, as mentioned, they can’t afford it!

“There’s very early talk, I’ve been told, of potentially down the road, some kind of merger,” says Thamel. Although even a merger would be tough, he says, since the Pac-12 brings a hefty amount of debt along with them thanks to former commissioner Larry Scott.

“One of the issues with the Pac-12 is they had so many issues under former commissioner Larry Scott and there’s 10s of millions of dollars in Comcast debt over misappropriated money — one of the many issues that’s loomed over that league from Scott’s tenure — that could make some kind of partnership or merger or whatever a little bit gummy because no one would want to inherit that much debt.”

The Pac-12 just can’t get out of its own way as it continues to fall apart.