Pac-12 Basketball: 10 potential candidates for expansion after losing USC and UCLA

As bizarre as it’s been in recent years, and it’s gotten plenty bizarre already, conference realignment is a very real thing that will have a major impact on college athletics in the years to come. We had a major cycle of this realignment around a decade ago, with the new Big East and the AAC forming, and a few minor changes to the power conference leagues. Nowadays, those moves look like child’s play.

We’ve already had the announcement that Oklahoma and Texas are leaving for the SEC, while the Big 12 will replace them with BYU, Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF. Now, we’ve heard the mind-shattering news that UCLA and USC will abandon the Pac-12 for the Big Ten in a move that is clearly about money and not geography or common sense. Those two Los Angeles schools are nearly three thousand miles away from Rutgers, the furthest eastern team in the Big Ten.

However, this may only be the beginning of the process, with further dominoes from conference realignment expected, perhaps even in the coming days. We don’t know exactly how things are going to unfold, but the likely scenario is a pair of super-conferences. For now, we can only operate based on facts, and the most recent fact is that UCLA and USC leave the Pac-12 in 2024, meaning that the West Coast power conference is back down to ten members again.

It’s very possible that additional teams from the Pac-12 are poached by the Big Ten or Big 12 in the coming weeks, but for now those ten teams remain together. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that these ten schools remain in the conference, but that the conference won’t want to stand pat, especially after losing two of their more prominent schools. The Pac-12 would likely look to add two more schools, or perhaps even more, perhaps attempting to get to 14 or 16 total schools.

Today, we’ll be looking closely at ten different schools that could be candidates for expansion into the Pac-12. As previously mentioned, we’re proceeding with the scenario that the current teams remain in place, meaning those schools in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Washington would still be part of the conference. Without further ado, let’s start diving into some of these teams, keeping in mind that we’re not disregarding geography today (I’m sorry but Boston College and Maine are not joining the Pac-12).