How the new Pac-12 standings would have looked in football, basketball for the 2024-25 season | Sports

The new Pac-12 is still one more season away from coming to fruition, but it’s worth comparing how the eventual group of teams are doing currently. More importantly, it’s a good time to speculate on which teams would have done the best this past sports season. The Pac-12 will be mixing and matching teams from at least three different conferences (old Pac-12, Mountain West and West Coast) with another team yet to be added, likely from a fourth league. How will these teams mix and who will find themselves at the top of the hierarchy in various sports?

Those questions will remain unanswered for now, but we can look at this past year to get the beginnings of an idea. We’ll both look at what the 2024-25 standings for each of the three most viewed sports — football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball — to get an idea for who would have been the best. But alongside, that, there will be a peek into the future of what the Pac-12 may look like in these respective sports compared to its peers.

Let’s start with the big money sport: football.

Football

There’s not much from last season to suggest than the new Pac-12 would have put up any more resistance to Boise State’s dominance last year than the Mountain West did. The Broncos won their four games against Pac-12 teams by an average of 25 points, which included wins over both the old Pac-12 schools. At that point, it’s just a question of second place.

Washington State would probably have been the team to claim second, though Fresno State, Oregon State and Colorado State would have made for a good challenge. The Beavers beat the Cougars in a late-season clash last year and the Bulldogs played WSU pretty close as well. The Cougars ultimately had better consistency, though, which would likely end up being the difference in getting the silver medal in the standings.

Essentially, we end up with three broad tiers. Boise State stands alone in its own. Washington State, Fresno State, Colorado State and Oregon State in a second tier. And at the tail end of the conference, Utah State and San Diego State, which went a combined 0-6 when facing other Pac-12 teams (excluding their own matchup against each other).

Turning from the past to the future, and the coming years the Pac-12 in football are murky in a rather interesting way. Aside from Boise State, who’s return to the form from its BCS-busting days last year was a welcome resurgence, there are some serious questions regarding incoming Mountain West teams. Not in the sense that they’re bad programs, but that these programs are otherwise rather successful but are going through a low point right now.

Utah State and San Diego State are the poster children for this. Both had very solid success in the past decade, but not right now. They’ve gone from teams that have combined for three Mountain West championships and five division titles to having just one winning season between them in the last three years. Fresno State, another former MW conference champion, just posted its first losing seasons since 2019. Throw in Colorado State, which hasn’t seen sustained multi-season success for more than a decade, and most of the teams departing the Mountain West for the Pac-12 are on a downswing in terms of success.

The level of worry and/or panic for these programs mainly lies in how confident they are that past success will soon be replicated. Utah State just hired a new coach, Bronco Mendenhall who has rehabilitated programs before. Jay Norvell, now entering his fourth year at Colorado State, just got the Rams to their first season of 8+ wins since 2014. Then there’s Fresno State, whose 2024 season can probably be chalked up to Jeff Tedford stepping away from being head coach in mid-July and leading to an interim head coach for the season. All of these teams have reasonable optimism for the future, but time will tell which of these programs will justify that optimism.

Football is the money maker for conferences, and the fact the Pac-12 is questionable right now in this sport isn’t a great sign. They’ll need multiple teams to step up and join Boise State as real contenders to make the College Football Playoff. 

Men’s Basketball

Unlike football, the Pac-12’s short term (and likely long-term) future in men’s basketball is very, very bright. As the conference itself noted, Pac-12 schools would have collectively made up the fourth-best conference by average NET ranking last year. Half of the conference made the NCAA Tournament (Gonzaga, Utah State, Colorado State, San Diego State) with two other teams inside the top 115 of the NET. Six of the eight teams have made the Big Dance within the last two years, seven have at least one appearance since 2021 (sorry, Fresno State, you’re the odd one out). And there’s still potential for more upward movement for most of the current and incoming members.

Gonzaga pretty clearly had the best season in terms of high-end potential, at least by most metrics. NET loved the Bulldogs a lot more than the rest of the Pac-12 schools, though it didn’t quite show up in their NCAA Tournament seeding as they were the 30th overall team in the field (and an eight seed) with Utah State being not too far off at 40th. It’d be up to interpretation whether Gonzaga would have run away with the league title or if the Aggies and Rams would have put up more of a fight than they did with New Mexico.

There’s actually a fun little experiment with men’s basketball only that’s possible due to the existence of the Haslametrics game prediction tool. We can have a chance at guessing how each team would have done against a full 14-game Pac-12 schedule (each of the eight teams playing the other seven opponents home and away). Haslametrics’ tool allows for anyone to plug in a team and see what the sites analytics would predict for a game result against any other team in Division I. In this case, we’ll use all real-life home and away results the Pac-12 teams played against each other, but in cases where games didn’t happen we’ll use Haslametrics as a fill-in (keep in mind, there were a few neutral site games played between future Pac-12 teams but those aren’t being counted in this predicted standings since this presumed 14-game schedule is just home and away games).

This methodology doesn’t account for any potential upsets that may have happened in some of these games (Gonzaga would have gone a clean 14-0 according to Haslametrics, but lost to Oregon State in reality) as it’s favorites only for every win. But this is mainly just another window into which teams would have been the contenders and by how much over other teams. Again, Gonzaga was pretty clearly the top team with Utah State and Colorado State as clear follow-ups. Behind them Boise State and San Diego State were clearly dangerous teams, but not consistent enough for title contention. Oregon State and Washington State, despite being in the bottom three, were good enough to offer quality games and high upset potential (which, again, happened in real life). The lone doormat team ended up being Fresno State.

Even if the Pac-12 doesn’t improve itself in football, there’s a good path forward for the conference as a dominant basketball league. The addition of Gonzaga raises the potential of the conference to a significant degree, as nearly all of the best western mid-major powers will soon call the Pac-12 home. Basically the entire conference will be yearly contenders to make the NCAA Tournament, and the battles for the league title each year should be robust, even if Gonzaga ends up taking a large share of them. NCAA Tournament units should quickly become a very good source of revenue for what will be a multi-bid conference every year.

Women’s Basketball

Unlike the other two sports we’ve looked at, there’s no runaway frontrunner. Three teams, Colorado State, San Diego State and Gonzaga, all sat pretty close together in the NET with four teams (add Washington State to the other three) having at least 21 wins. Though, that isn’t to say there isn’t any favorite. Colorado State went 9-1 against Pac-12 teams, including 2-0 against San Diego State, the closest challenger to the Rams.

We don’t have a free matchup predictor tool for the women’s basketball games to try and split any further hairs, but it seems pretty apparent that most of the Pac-12 would have been pretty competitive. Outside of Utah State, every team won at least 18 games and had a winning record. Most teams also went around .500 against other Pac-12 teams with even Fresno State, ranking seventh among its conference mates in NET, having a winning record of 5-3. It’d be fair to say Colorado State would likely win, but this would have been a very fun conference to cover with so many battles for positioning in the standings and very likely an exciting conference tournament.

In terms of health of the sport, the contrast between men’s basketball and women’s basketball is stark, and much like the Mountain West when you look at it. Whereas six of the eight men’s basketball teams were in the top 100 of the NET, with four teams making the NCAA Tournament, only two of the Pac-12 women’s teams were in the top 100 of the NET. There were no at-large bids for the women’s teams, with the only NCAA Tournament bids coming via winning conference tournaments (Oregon State and San Diego State). It’s possible an increase in strength of schedule that being in the Pac-12 will provide could bolster the collective NET of the teams. Would it make enough of a difference to make the conference a multi-bid league? It’s hard to be certain.

What is certain is that while women’s basketball may not be quite as high profile as the men’s side, it is growing in popularity and in the potential money it can earn. Unlike basically every other non-football/basketball sport, women’s basketball can be profitable. Programs now earn NCAA Tournament units that can bolster that profitability and capitalizing on it should be a priority of the conference. It’ll be something to keep an eye on in the coming years.