The Big Ten voted Thursday to add Southern California and UCLA as conference members beginning in 2024.
The expansion to 16 teams will happen after the Pac-12’s current media rights contracts with Fox and ESPN expire and make the Big Ten the first conference to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The announcement, which caught the Pac-12 off-guard, came almost a year after Oklahoma and Texas formally accepted invitations to join the Southeastern Conference in July 2025.
Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said USC and UCLA, both members of the Pac-12 and its previous iterations for nearly a century, submitted applications for membership and the league’s Council of Presidents and Chancellors voted unanimously to add the Los Angeles schools.
MORE:
Losing flagship schools like USC and UCLA is a major blow to the Pac-12.
The Pac-12’s next move is unknown, but adding schools to replace USC and UCLA is a possibility.
Meanwhile, USC and UCLA stand to significantly increase their revenues. The Pac-12 distributed only $19.8 million per school in fiscal year 2021, by far the least among Power 5 conferences. The Big Ten’s per-school distribution was $46.1 million, second only to the SEC’s $54.6 million.
The Pac-12 has had difficulty getting its conference television network untracked while the Big Ten Network is the most established of the conference networks.
USC and UCLA would be taking a step up in football, both in visibility and competition.
