Pac-12 adds Gonzaga but still needs another football-playing member

SAN DIEGO — San Diego State will host Gonzaga in men’s basketball on Nov. 18 in the back end of a home-and-home nonconference series.

It won’t be the last we’ll see of the Bulldogs at Viejas Arena.

Gonzaga announced Tuesday morning it is joining the Pac-12 in basketball and other sports beginning in the 2026-27 academic year, becoming the reformed conference’s eighth member with Oregon State, Washington State, SDSU and four other Mountain West schools.

It’s also the first private university in a reconstructed league that exclusively included large state schools, with several in small, rural areas.

The Pac-12 is required to reach eight full members by 2026-27 required for inclusion in the College Football Playoff, but Gonzaga won’t count because it doesn’t play football.

The Bulldogs, though, do bring a national basketball brand — coach Mark Few’s program is the only one in Division I to appear in nine straight Sweet 16s — and represent a victory for a conference desperately in need of one after being spurned last week by transfer targets from American Athletic Conference as well as UNLV and Air Force from the Mountain West. It also gives SDSU, the league’s next most successful program, an immediate rival.

“Obviously, we’re thrilled to have Gonzaga in the league,” SDSU Athletic Director John David Wicker said. “It was a great basketball league before this. This makes it that much better.”

Gonzaga had been an expansion priority since Oregon State and Washington State, realizing they weren’t following their 10 brethren into a power conference, began rebuilding the Pac-12. Wicker has said the ideal league constitution is nine football members allowing for an eight-game conference football schedule plus at least one non-football member that’s a basketball power.

Other non-football candidates are Saint Mary’s and Grand Canyon, both of which reached the NCAA Tournament last spring. Grand Canyon is set to join the WCC next year.

“What gets lost on people is at an Alabama or Ohio State or even Iowa State, football revenue is so large it dwarfs basketball revenue,” Wicker said. “But at our level, basketball revenue is much closer to football revenue, so basketball is that much more meaningful to our institutions.

“It doesn’t mean basketball doesn’t matter at those other places, but it’s a really big deal for us. And Gonzaga is a really valuable basketball commodity.”

It also might make it easier to attract other football members, since the Pac-12 with Gonzaga secured can now approach potential media partners to get a more concrete idea of the conference’s value in the marketplace.

“We’re happy where we’re at,” Wicker said. “At this point, we’ll really dig into the data and do some research on what television numbers look like and continue through our process. We’re not in any great rush to get that eighth (football) school. There’s immediacy, but we’re not going to rush into anything that’s not a valuable proposition for us.”

The remaining seven Mountain West members are no longer options after signing a binding grant of rights agreement through 2031-32, which encompasses the remaining two years of the current media rights contract and a new six-year deal.

Nor is UTEP, which announced Thursday it will join the Mountain West in 2026-27.

“There’s no doubt this will be better for our student-athletes, our fans, and for El Paso,” UTEP President Heather Wilson said in a news release. “We look forward to rekindling former rivalries and welcoming teams and their fans to El Paso.”

The Mountain West, which will have six full members after 2025-26 (plus Hawaii in football only), also reportedly has extended an invitation to Texas State in all sports and held discussions with the Mid-American Conference’s Toledo and Northern Illinois for football only.

That leaves less desirable expansion candidates like North Texas, Rice and New Mexico State. Another possibility for the Pac-12 is, once media rights projections are crystalized, is taking another run at Memphis or other AAC members that rebuffed its initial approach last month.

“I don’t think anything is off the table at this point,” Wicker said.

Gonzaga has kicked the tires on a new conference before, nearly leaving to join SDSU in the Mountain West in 2018 before remaining in the West Coast Conference thanks to a lucrative package of incentives that, most notably, included the ability to keep many of the NCAA Tournament payouts they generate instead of sharing them evenly with their fellow members.

More recently, the private Jesuit university in Spokane, Wash., held talks with the Big 12 as a non-football member.

Even with Gonzaga’s lopsided WCC deal, it stands to double or possibly triple revenue in the Pac-12. According to the most recently available federal tax filings, it received $3.21 million of the WCC’s total $4.35 disbursements in 2022. The next highest payout, to Saint Mary’s, was $636,082. The University of San Diego received only $70,901.

Gonzaga is expected to receive between a half and full share in the Pac-12, which hopes to attract a media rights deal worth at least $10 million per school per year.

Much of Gonzaga’s WCC money came from keeping its NCAA Tournament units after the first round. The Pac-12 is believed to have an incentive-based distribution system for NCAA units as well but with a different formulation.

Asked last week if he wanted the Bulldogs would in their new conference, SDSU coach Brian Dutcher said: “I would love for Gonzaga to come and join the party.”