A surprise move came out Wednesday night: Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State will leave the Mountain West Conference to join Oregon State and Washington State in the Pac-12 ahead of the 2026-27 academic year.

This latest round of conference realignment comes in the wake of the Pac-12’s collapse last summer, which was set in motion the year before when UCLA and USC announced they were leaving for the Big Ten.

Here’s what you need to know about the movements.

Go to:
What set this in motion? | Finance
Value of the conference | What other schools could participate?
What’s next for the Mountain West?

What set this in motion?

When Oregon State and Washington State sued the Pac-12 last year for control of the conference’s governance after eight schools left, they indicated in legal documents that they wanted to rebuild the conference. That didn’t mean they absolutely intended to carry out such a plan. But it was always an attractive option, even if it would be complicated to execute.

The NCAA requires conferences to have a minimum of eight members, and after the Pac-12 broke up, it was given a two-year grace period to stay under the minimum. That timeline dictated how quickly the conference had to move to stay in business.

What is the financial situation?

That’s partly why several industry sources have questioned whether this particular path forward was likely. The way the MWC bylaws are written, departing schools must pay an $18 million exit fee if they give two years’ notice. That amount doubles if it’s less. The departing schools here expect to owe $18 million each, which adds up to more than $70 million, plus the $40-plus million the Pac-12 will owe the Mountain West in poaching fees that were part of the conferences’ scheduling agreement for this season.

The idea that the Pac-12 (OSU and WSU) and the schools leaving the MWC would spend that kind of money was dismissed by many within the industry. Over the past year, multiple sources have called that expense a “non-starter” for this type of rebuild. Apparently, they were wrong.

The Pac-12 is expected to help schools with exit fees, in part because of the conference’s retained distribution fees for media rights to departing members and other assets.

How valuable will the new conference be for media rights partners?

Here’s where things get even more interesting. These six schools wouldn’t have paid the MWC more than $100 million to get to this point if they didn’t have faith that the potential for higher media rights payments would ultimately make it worth it. Also keep in mind that it’s likely that the MWC will try to withhold media rights distributions for the departing schools for the next two years, as it did when BYU, TCU and Utah left in 2011 and would do when San Diego State flirted with a move to the Pac-12 last year.

The departing schools expect to receive somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million annually from the Pac-12, a figure provided to the schools by Navigate, a private sports consulting firm hired by the conference. How accurate that projection is remains to be seen, but it would be roughly double what the MWC currently distributes.

Who else is the Pac-12 targeting?

They’ll likely aim high and end up lower on the list. Cal and Stanford are the dream acquisitions, but making that happen would be extremely complicated considering they just joined the ACC, which is the subject of four lawsuits regarding the potential departures of Clemson and Florida State. However, it’s worth wondering whether Cal and Stanford might regret their decision to join the ACC, considering they only receive a 30% share of the league’s media rights over the next seven years (in 2022-23, the ACC distributed an average of $44.8 million per school). While the ACC schools are closer academically than what the new-look Pac-12 will look like, it’s questionable how much that really matters in the grand scheme of things.

The more realistic targets are Tulane and Memphis. But those two would need a much clearer understanding of the financial picture to leave the AAC than the threshold set by the four MWC schools. Building the best football league outside the Power 4 would be attractive, but it would still have to make financial sense. UTSA’s location makes it a good fit.

Of the remaining MWC schools, UNLV is still seen as a likely candidate to move as well. It checks all the boxes, but the fact that it wasn’t in this first wave is telling. The MWC’s position is much weaker today than it was yesterday, and that could be used as leverage to lure UNLV — or other MWC schools — at smaller annual distribution rates, a la Cal and Stanford in the ACC. Air Force is probably the other MWC school that’s most attractive.

What’s next for Mountain West?

As it stands, membership in two years would be eight: Air Force, Hawai’i, Nevada, New Mexico, San José State, UNLV, Utah State and Wyoming. Another defector would drop the conference below the NCAA minimum requirement, for which it would — like the Pac-12 now — have a two-year grace period to grow back to at least eight.

There had previously been speculation that members could dissolve the conference — a process that requires a 75 percent vote — to avoid exit fees in order to join the Pac-12, but that would have required nine teams to be on board. That’s even less likely now, since the departing members are not expected to be able to vote.

The money from the Pac-12 raid could help rebuild the conference, using the Pac-12 plan. It’s too early to tell what that will look like in the long run, though.