Michigan vs. Washington will have a strange aura to it during Monday’s College Football Playoff championship.
It’s a Big Ten-vs.-Pac-12 game for a championship, but it won’t take place in Pasadena, home of the traditional Rose Bowl meeting between the two conferences. It’s a sign that the times, they are a-changing. And they’ll be even more drastically different after this season.
The next time these two teams meet — next year — will be as Big Ten Conference opponents. Washington is among the four Pac-12 teams leaving the conference after this season season for the Big Ten alongside Oregon, USC, and UCLA. The “Four Corner” schools of Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah will join the Big 12. Meanwhile, Cal and Stanford will join the ACC.
REQUIRED READING: Conference realignment will leave Pac-12 in pieces. See the decades of shifting alliances
As a result, Oregon State and Washington State have been left holding the bag in the Pac-12. These two schools anticipate operating as a two-team conference beginning in 2024, having successfully filed for a temporary restraining order from the conference in September.
Washington and Oregon were not originally in the cards for the Big Ten. USC and UCLA announced their absconsion in 2022, and the Pacific Northwest universities followed suit last summer. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah announced their Big 12 move at the same time as Washington and Oregon announced their departure. Within a month, Cal and Stanford were gone as well.
The domino effect has left the college football world wondering what is next, with the Power Five conferences being condensed to four.
What happened to the Pac-12?
After the Big Ten and SEC’s new media rights deals, things did not go as smoothly for the Pac-12.
Despite the formation of an alliance between the Big Ten, Pac-12, and ACC after…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/happened-pac-12-why-washington-121517469.html
Author : Detroit Free Press
Publish date : 2024-01-08 12:15:17
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