Pac-12 Conference

The Pac-12 Conference is a collegiate athletic conference that operates in the Western United States, participating in 24 sports at the NCAA Division I level. Its football teams compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS; formerly Division I-A), the highest level of college football in the nation.

The conference's 12 members are located in the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. They include each state's flagship public university, four additional public universities, and two private research universities.

The modern Pac-12 conference formed after the disbanding of the Pacific Coast Conference (PCC), the principal members of which founded the Athletic Association of Western Universities (AAWU) in 1959. The conference previously went by the names Big Five, Big Six, Pacific-8, and Pacific-10. The Pac-12 moniker was adopted in 2011 with the addition of Colorado and Utah.

Nicknamed the "Conference of Champions", the Pac-12 has won more NCAA national championships in team sports than any other conference in history. The top three schools with the most NCAA team championships are members of the Pac-12: Stanford; University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and University of Southern California (USC), respectively. Washington's national title in women's rowing in 2017 was the 500th NCAA championship won by a Pac-12 school.

On June 30, 2022, amid the broader early-2020s NCAA conference realignment, UCLA and USC announced plans to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten Conference starting in 2024. In 2023, Colorado announced it would re-join the Big 12 starting in 2024. Oregon and Washington announced plans to also join the Big Ten in 2024. Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah announced plans to follow Colorado to the Big 12, which would have left the Pac-12 with just four member schools. Also, the Atlantic Coast Conference voted to add Stanford and Cal in addition to SMU from the American Athletic Conference in 2024, dropping conference membership to just Oregon State and Washington State for the 2024–25 season. On September 8, 2023, Oregon State and Washington State filed a lawsuit against the Pac-12 and Commissioner George Kliavkoff in Washington State Superior Court for control of the conference, contesting that the departing schools, under the conference constitution, forfeited their position to determine ongoing conference matters, which appears to be nothing more than their desire to dissolve the league and drain its millions of dollars in assets. As the legal battle plays out, Yahoo! Sports reported that the Pac-12 is "expected to operate as a two-member conference at least for [2024]" and would be recognized under a two-year grace period, until 2026, to meet conference requirements in the NCAA bylaws.