Two months out from kickoff of the 2025 college football season, a conference that was dead for all intents and purposes now commands the headlines. And the Pac-12 has three-plus decades of Texas flirtation to thank for the league’s comeback.
The conference’s long-rumored and finally confirmed invitation to Texas State makes the Pac-8.5 ahead of the 2026–27 academic year, with an octet of football-sponsoring members. That’s enough to gain recognition as an official FBS conference — a major step toward the 110-year-old league coming off life support.
It’s also the erstwhile Conference of Champions’ first foray into the Lone Star State — a long-speculated eastward expansion discussed as far back as the early 1990s.
Buzz about Pac-10/12 interest in adding a Texas-based member surfaced with the University of Houston more than 30 years ago, just as the old Southwest Conference was tearing at the seams. Reports from the time suggest interest was one-sided; the idea of South Texas representing the Pacific Conference seemed preposterous back before college leagues went national.
The addition of Texas State coincides with a broadcasting deal announced this week, which expands the presence original Pac-12 holdovers Oregon State and Washington State have on CBS, ESPN and The CW.
A sudden flood of promising off-field developments comes just weeks after surviving member Oregon State made a return trip to the Men’s College World Series. Altogether, summer 2025 is arguably the best time for the conference since 2010. That offseason, the Pac-10 expanded to 12 with the additions of Colorado and Utah and finalized what was — briefly — the wealthiest TV contract in college sports history.
Of course, having its best offseason since 2010 is a low bar to clear. The 15 years since a then-new commissioner, Larry Scott, went from the toast of college athletics to perhaps the most criticized figure in the space were marked by miscalculations and misfortunes, setting in motion the exodus that threatened the Pac’s existence, beginning with UCLA and USC’s announced exits for the Big Ten in 2022.
The Bruins and Trojans leaving as part of the Big Ten’s speculated move to reshape college football into a Power Two format alongside the SEC didn’t come under Scott’s tenure. George Kliavkoff succeeded Scott as commissioner a year prior — long after the series of mistakes that made the Big Ten’s poaching possible.
But that isn’t to suggest Kliavkoff’s brief tenure wasn’t disastrous. Kliavkoff could best be described as the Herbert Hoover of college athletics commissioners: figureheads who inherited a mess and compounded it with their inaction.
The leadership tenures of both Scott and Kliavkoff have ties to rumored moves into Texas that never came to fruition. Scott’s is the more well-known, though it may have been less realistic.
Chatter of Texas heading to the Pac-10 coincided with the league’s additions of Colorado and Utah in 2010. The Longhorns were mentioned as expansion candidates alongside Red River rival Oklahoma in a monumental move that college football media revisits every few years.
And just how genuine those talks were remains a mystery today.
Whether or not Texas used the Pac as a bargaining chip to strong-arm the Big 12 — which the Longhorns abandoned anyway 11 years later — failure to expand to Austin is an oft-cited knock on Scott’s era.
The Kliavkoff-era Pac-12 adding SMU amid the turmoil of 2023 seems like a more realistic foray into Texas. The league’s failure to do so is among the many instances of Kliavkoff getting caught flat-footed during his brief period at the helm.
SMU instead landed in the ACC — an odd geographic fit and, despite the Mustangs reaching the College Football Playoff their first year in the league, a perhaps worse long-term home than the Pac-12. Adding SMU to the remaining corps of Arizona, Arizona State, Cal, Oregon State, Stanford, Utah and Washington State would have made for a solid foundation after the departures of the Big Ten targets.
Missing out on SMU may have helped doom one version of the Pac-12, but the conference finally extending into Texas is a poetic move toward its rebirth. Of the new-look league’s members for 2026–27, Texas State has the least impressive football history.
The Bobcats won a Division II national championship in 1982 and peaked in the former Division I-AA with a run to the semifinals in 2005. Their tenure in FBS — which began, coincidentally, as another Western conference’s attempt to stay alive amid realignment (the old WAC) — has been mostly unremarkable.
However, San Marcos is a booming Texas city with its location between Austin and San Antonio. Texas State football is similarly one of those sleeping-giant programs you often hear about, and fast-rising coaching star G.J. Kinne is awakening that potential in the Sun Belt.
The school’s addition to the rebuilding Pac is a low-risk, high-upside move. And the conference’s expansion into Texas is a long time coming.
