It’s officially official.
As of Aug. 2, Utah is a member of the Big 12 Conference.
Despite getting a taste of their new conference last month during football media days in Las Vegas, the Utes didn’t officially become members of the Big 12 until Friday, one day after the Pac-12 Conference’s grant of rights expired.
After the collapse of the Pac-12, Utah’s first Power Five conference home, the Utes start a new journey in the Big 12 this month.
Here’s how the Utes got here, and what’s in store for them in their new conference home.
How the Pac-12 collapsed
More than a decade ago, it was Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott on the offensive, trying to expand into a 16-team superconference and effectively kill the Big 12 Conference in the process.
Scott’s plan was to invite Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado to the current 10-team conference. Colorado accepted, concerned that the Big 12 might collapse, but when the other schools decided to stay in the Big 12, the Buffaloes needed a geographic partner.
Utah had been on the Pac-12′s radar during expansion, with athletic director Chris Hill staying in contact with Scott throughout the process, and once it was clear that the other five schools were staying in the Big 12, the Utes got the call, moving from the Mountain West Conference to the Pac-12.
After significant football success in the Mountain West Conference, including undefeated seasons in 2004 and 2008 where they crashed the BCS, Utah finally got a seat at the table.
Utah’s addition to the Pac-12 in 2011 was the pronouncement that the Utes had finally arrived in the college football world.
The effects, for both the athletic program and the university, were substantial.
The $1.2 million per year in television rights money from the Mountain West Conference transformed to $21 million per year from the Pac-12 Conference, which was a record-breaking TV rights deal at the time.
Donations from boosters increased upon Utah’s arrival in the Pac-12, and in 2013, the $32 million, 150,000-square-foot Spence and Cleone Eccles Football Center opened, providing the football team with a state-of-the-art facility. Other facilities were built — one for the basketball team, one for the ski team, one for the golf team — and several others were refreshed and expanded, including the tennis facility and gymnastics facility.
Rice-Eccles Stadium was expanded for the first time since 1998, growing to 51,444 seats and debuting a revamped south end zone and new locker rooms.
Academically, the university benefited from the Pac-12 Conference, seeing increases of hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding alongside the benefits of being partners with prestigious universities like Stanford, Cal and UCLA, all while enrollment grew.
The quality of athletes in every sport increased, and after a few rough years during the transition from a Group of Five conference to a Power Five conference, teams started winning conference titles, starting with gymnastics in 2014. Gymnastics won six Pac-12 championships in its time in the conference, along with four regular-season crowns.
Other sports that won Pac-12 championships include baseball, softball, women’s basketball and men’s tennis. Utah’s ski team also won five national championships.
After years of being close, including losing back-to-back Pac-12 football championships in 2018 and 2019, the Utes finally broke through and reached the Pac-12 summit, winning consecutive titles in 2021 and 2022.
Thanks in part to the boost in recruiting from being a Pac-12 member, Kyle Whittingham built a program that has seen constant success and has appeared in the College Football Playoff Top 25 in every year except 2020.
“Pac-12 was instrumental in building the program, not just beneficial,” Whittingham said last year. “Having that Pac-12 moniker on your shirt and that conference affiliation ramped up everything in this program — facilities, recruiting, budget, salaries, everything. Making the move to Power Five was a game-changer for the program, for the university, for the community, in my opinion.”
Utah had thought it had found a long term conference home, and fans loved the Pac-12. Big-time venues like the LA Memorial Coliseum, Autzen Stadium and Husky Stadium, combined with Los Angeles, the Oregon Coast, Seattle and the Bay Area as travel destinations, meant there was always a large contingent of Utah fans at every road venue.
But the only constant in the modern age of college athletics is change, and change struck again in 2021.
Just as Texas and Oklahoma’s rebuke of joining the Pac-12 was instrumental for Utah to join the conference in 2010, a decade later, the two schools set in motion more big realignment changes.
In 2021, the Longhorns and Sooners agreed to bolt from the Big 12 to the SEC, and the Big 12 Conference saved itself, yet again, by adding BYU, UCF, Cincinnati and Houston that same year to keep the league afloat.
In 2022, the Big Ten made moves to make its own superconference in response to the SEC’s additions, prying USC and UCLA away from the Pac-12. The Big 12 beat the Pac-12 to the media rights punch, securing a…
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