As the Pac-12 re-launches this college football season, it will be the only FBS conference to not host traditional football media days or an official preseason kickoff event this summer.
Over the next four weeks, the other nine leagues will welcome national and local media outlets around the country as hype builds for the upcoming season, beginning with the the Big 12’s football media days in Frisco, Texas, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The ACC, SEC, and Big Ten will host their own media days or kickoff events in the following three weeks, respectively, welcoming hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of credentialed media members.The other five non-power conferences (American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, and Sun Belt) have various preseason media days planned during the second third weeks of July.
But the Pac-12, which will expand from two to eight football programs this fall, is opting to buck the longtime trend of gathering conference executives, coaches, and players in a hotel ballroom or convention center for several days for reporters to quiz them about the biggest topics on and off the field.
“We could have,” Pac-12 senior VP and deputy commissioner Rick Hart said last month. “We talked about it. Those are expensive.”
Hart was speaking at Fresno State, one of six new Pac-12 football members alongside Boise State, Colorado State, San Diego State, Texas State, and Utah State, who are joining Oregon State and Washington State—the only remaining members of the old Pac-12. Gonzaga is also joining the conference as a non-football member.
“Traditionally, you spend a lot of money, you bring everybody together for two or three days, you disrupt camp or whatever’s going on,” Hart said. “Maybe you get the media there, maybe you don’t. Maybe you get 72 hours of publicity alongside all the other leagues that are doing media days. It’s pretty noisy. There’s a lot of static. And then everybody moves on.”
The non-traditional approach to promoting a new college football season comes as the Pac-12 continues its search for a new identity—something it’s been doing ever since it was raided by the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12, which collectively took the conference’s other 10 teams after the 2023-24 academic year.
With just two teams ahead of the 2024 college football season, the Pac-12 hosted what was effectively a cocktail party in Las Vegas in lieu of a traditional media days event. Dubbed “After Hours with the Beavs & Cougs” at the Bellagio, representatives from Washington State and Oregon State, as well as Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould, met with reporters after the Big 12’s media days concluded at Allegiant Stadium.
While not as formal as that 2024 event, Gould and Hart will be in Frisco this week meeting with some members of the media who are in town covering the Big 12’s media days. The Pac-12 is likely to allocate the budget it would have spent on hosting traditional media days to other promotional events throughout the upcoming season, one league source told Front Office Sports.
The Pac-12 did not host any media days last year, as momentum had begun to build for a re-launch in 2026 with new teams.
Under former commissioner George Kliavkoff, the Pac-12 hosted traditional football media days in Las Vegas in 2023 and San Francisco in 2022.
