USC and UCLA have already announced their departures from the Pac-12 Conference. RealDawg.com has learned that a time “Around Memorial Day” is when there will be an official announcement that both the University of Washington and the University of Oregon are leaving the Pac-12 Conference for the B1G Conference. The move won’t occur until 2024 or 2025.
“The Pac-12 as we know it will be done by July,” a source has informed RealDawg.com. “Utah, Colorado, ASU, and Arizona are already gone.”
Oregon State and Washington State appear to be getting the rawest of deals out of the moves, while Stanford’s and Cal’s future is uncertain. However, all four could choose to keep their current conference affiliations. For their part, the source said that “the Pac-12 will likely absorb all of the MWC because it has more buying power, but Washington State and Oregon State are getting hosed.”
It’s expected that Washington and Oregon will join USC and UCLA as a Western Division affiliation. Each school will have a home-and-home series each year within the divisions. The same will occur across the new B1G making 3 other divisions.
However, both Washington and Oregon have requested to keep their in-state rivalry games. The Apple Cup and the Oregon/Oregon State games could move up much earlier in the season into non-conference slots.
“They will probably keep 2 and possibly 3 non-conference games, as well,” the source told RealDawg.com.
Apart from the regional divisions, the Huskies and Ducks would play other in-conference games split between home and away, but likely not the same teams in a season.
Over the past few months, there have been several meetings with the B1G Conference where Washington’s and Oregon’s sincerity and commitments were being measured. That hurdle appears to have been cleared. At this point, both Oregon and Washington are finalizing documents for the agreement.
“The conference wanted to make sure that a few years down the line that neither school would have any sort of buyer’s remorse and leave for a conference on the West Coast.
The TV deal for the new conference has been cut and the Pac-12 hasn’t been able to come close to matching it.
“Any new Pac-12 TV deal isn’t on the level of what the B1G TV deal is offering,” they said.
The financial terms of Washington’s and Oregon’s portion of the new TV deal are not yet confirmed by RealDawg.com.
More on this development tomorrow in Part 2
