Hopefully you’re reading this shortly after I sent it, because I cannot promise that what follows will still be relevant at any later point today. That’s how fast things are moving with the Pac-12’s expansion.

For those of us who have been riding the realignment roller coaster — following every rumor and potential development, to the detriment of our own mental health — it’s hardly believable that it’s only been 14 days since WSU and Oregon State started rocking the conference realignment boat once again by adding the top four schools from the Mountain West: Boise State, San Diego State, Fresno State, and Colorado State.

A whole heck of a lot has gone on this week, but in the end, the conference has only added Utah State. The latest development is that the Pac-12’s most recent target, UNLV, has signed a new agreement with the Mountain West that comes with a $21 million bribe retention bonus for sticking around that will be paid for by the exit fees from the five MWC schools who have joined the reformed Pac-12.

I don’t want to assume that all of you are as terminally online as me (and those of us hanging around the Slack), so I actually published a quick recap of how we got here on the newsletter website. If you need to catch up on the timeline of events, go check that out.

Left with the original six plus Utah State, and having been turned down by five other targets, where do WSU and the Pac-12 go from here?

In a supremely weird turn of events, there seem to be a lot of national media folks out there rooting for the demise of Washington State, Oregon State, and the Pac-12. These people expressed mild sympathy toward us when the Pac-12 imploded, but that also came with an assumption that we’d just accept our relegation and join the MWC — you know, like you’re supposed to do when unchecked corporate greed “inevitably” marches on without you.

WSU and OSU made it clear from the outset that they were not about to do that, which surprised everyone. And they have continued not doing that, whether it’s suing the defecting 10 for the Pac-12’s assets, setting up a scheduling agreement with the MWC for football but an affiliate membership in the WCC for everyone else, leveraging our position as a former P5 conference to get some concessions from the CFP, and — in the last two weeks — beginning a rebuilding of the Pac-12 by adding five teams that wanted to leave the MWC for something better.

It sure seems like a lot of people out there don’t like this very much. Rather than pointing the finger at the gluttonous appetite for money on the part of folks who already have truckloads of it — which is what actually led us to this point — suddenly we’re the assholes for having the audacity to try and stay alive?

[Big Ten and Big 12 try to kill our conference and leave us for dead]

“Boy that sure is a bummer. You really feel for Washington State and Oregon State. Anyway, let’s get back to Alabama-Georgia …”

[WSU and OSU position themselves as best they can by choosing the best option from a bunch of bad ones by rebuilding the Pac-12]

“These jerks are just as bad as the Big Ten and Big 12, which they claim to hate! Hypocrites! Why are they trying to pick on the MWC??”

Take, for example, this article in The Athletic this morning by Chris Vannni, titled, “The Pac-12 and Mountain West should get over hurt feelings and just merge,” which includes this incredible passage (emphasis mine):

Wait.

This is the “dumbest stage”? After everything that’s happened … you think it’s THIS??

There are other articles like this one where, somehow, trying to survive is worse than being unrepentantly greedy. Take it away, Chris!

Well, Chris, I know what the Pac-12 is doing here: It’s building a conference that gives its members a chance to survive in this current hellscape that is specifically designed to make sure they don’t.

I can also see what you are doing here, Chris: You’re engaging in victim blaming, just like all of your colleagues. It’s amazing just how much everyone now suddenly cares about the plight of the little guy.

Harvey Dent put it best:

Even the CFP felt compelled to put word out on the street this week — through their many mouthpieces — that we probably should knock it off and stay in our lane, lest we get a little too uppity:

Where I come from — as a journalist, as a union organizer — if you’re pissing off people in power, you’re probably doing something right.

This has caused these media folks — whose main job is to curry favor with P4 coaches and administrators so they can get their scoops — to delight in the “failure” of the conference to land five of its top targets this week in its effort to expand. An example of one of the tamer takes:

They’re all disingenuous. And they’re all wrong.

When you take a big swing, you don’t have to have the perfect outcome or get everything you wanted to get in order to call it a success. What the Pac-12 has done — even with the rejections — is already a success.

I will allow this much: Starting with half a conference and then having a bunch of schools turn you down publicly isn’t a great look. But I don’t think the other options were any better.

Try and put together the entire new conference all at once with teams from two different conferences? That would require some extremely complicated and savvy negotiating and also require them all to jump at the same time. That’s a recipe for an 11th hour disaster.

Another option: Waiting and hoping that the armageddon we all know is eventually coming happens in the next 12 months, and that you’re there to jump in as it’s all pieced together.

Come on. That’s not a plan. That’s a recipe for getting backed all the way into the MWC against your will — and probably getting extorted by them again for the privilege.

No, landing a bunch of top G5 football brands and then saying to folks, “Come join this great burgeoning conference we have!” was the way to go, even if it didn’t get you everyone you wanted. Because where the Pac-12 sits now — even with just seven teams, needing one (and probably two) more — is not even remotely as bad as it seems, despite the fact that these writers all seem very invested in creating a narrative that all of the Pac-12’s moves are just pointless shuffling.

Here’s Vannini again:

Setting aside for a second the insane notion that the pursuit of riches on top of riches by the top conferences in the sport is so obviously an acceptable given that it does not even merit a second thought, his clearly rhetorical questions actually have answers. They are:

The idea that the reconstructed Pac-12 represents no meaningful change from the status quo with even just these seven school is flat wrong, but it’s not stopping anyone from pushing that narrative — even a couple of folks who I regard as pretty damn smart:

Y’all: We absolutely do not have “two MWCs”. What we have is:

(I’d also love to know which long-standing, storied MWC rivalries Bill Connelly thinks have been broken by this move. ALSO, a purveyor of a power metric such as SP+ should know better than to call this “two MWCs.” But I digress.)

The Pac-12’s obvious goal all along — which even Vannini acknowledges — has been to build a conference that might not be on the level of the Power 4, but is also a clear cut above the rest of G5. Of course that would be good for media valuations, and also it probably would not be enough to create a real financial gap between themselves and the media payouts for other G5 conferences.

But here’s (another) one of the (many) spots where Vannini gets it wrong: You can really make some hay with CFP and NCAA men’s tournament appearances. If you can put together a conference that is going to be (a) the one to get that fifth CFP bid more often that not, and (b) getting multiple NCAA tournament men’s basketball bids and wins each year, well … you’ve created something that is going to distance yourself financially from the rest of G5.

Without a doubt, adding Tulane, Memphis, and USF would have cemented that status. And adding Gonzaga (which is still very much on the table) would do the same from a basketball perspective. But (again) where Vannini (and everyone else) gets it wrong is this:

As it stands NOW — with just the seven currently on board — this new Pac-12 is already a cut above the rest of G5. They have already done what they set out to do!

There’s a great conference simulator that allows you to play around with conference affiliations before spitting out some visuals to compare the relative strength of conferences. The data runs from 2006 to 2022; here’s how the new-look Pac-12 compares to the new-look MWC — and the (so-far) intact AAC — via a slew of metrics:

“Two MWCs” my ass. The Pac-12 is way ahead of the American, and way WAAAAAAY ahead of the the zombie MWC. And if you want to say “well data that’s that old isn’t relevant,” here’s how it looks if we simply include just the five most recent seasons in the dataset. The gap between the Pac-12 and American is only slightly smaller, and the gap between the Pac-12 and the MWC is even bigger:

We didn’t just add the programs that are historically superior — we added the programs that are historically superior and still getting better.

What if we just went with the Vannini Plan — the so-called “reverse merger” where WSU and OSU just fold into the MWC as it exists and rebrands as the Pac-12? There’s now virtually no difference between the “Pac-12” and the American:

That is why you go down this road and cut the dead weight at the bottom instead of just joining up with the MWC.² Once upon a time, a conference was more about like-minded institutions with similar academic missions and similar athletics ambitions.

The new Pac-12 is that.

The one thing that could close that gap a bit between the Pac-12 and the American and the Sun Belt and the MWC comes from who else the Pac-12 might add. Mandel isn’t totally wrong to ask “who’s left?” when your options to get up to eight (or, preferably, nine for football scheduling purposes) includes the likes of Texas State, UTEP, etc.

It’s hard to underscore just how much more difficult geography makes this endeavor, but this map — which plots the location of every FBS program in the country, minus Hawaii — illustrates it well. There just aren’t that many schools in the western half of the country!

Is it ideal to have to add a couple of schools you might not want to add? No. But also, the top of your conference is good enough that if you add, say, Texas State and UTEP, you’re still at the top of that heap, although the gap has closed a bit:

But I’m just going to throw this one out here: The prospect of adding at least one team from the American still is not dead. Memphis AD Ed Scott himself made that crystal clear yesterday.

“Where does this go?," he said. "If y’all haven’t seen the latest reports of what’s going on with the Mountain West and the Pac-6, -7 right now, this is a fluid situation. Listen, they all have my phone number. So if they call, I'm answering. I've never not answered a call when anyone from another school or another conference has called. If they call, I'm going to listen. That's my job."

Without a doubt, the rumors of the Pac-12’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

And they hate us for it.

Let’s keep leaning into it.