SAN DIEGO — San Diego State Director of Athletics John David Wicker was briefly overcome with emotion, his voice fluttering before pausing, then delivering his opening statement about the Aztecs joining the Pac-12 Conference at a press conference on Thursday morning at Snapdragon Stadium.
SDSU will join Oregon State and Washington State, as well as current Mountain West Conference member schools Boise State, Colorado State and Fresno State on July 1, 2026. The Pac-12 Conference Board of Directors voted unanimously to approve all four for membership on Thursday, with competition to begin in the 2026-27 academic year.
“We’ve worked hard for this — we’ve invested in San Diego State,” Wicker said with San Diego State President Adela de la Torre. “The academic institution has to improve as much as the athletic institution, and credit to President de la Torre, credit to our previous presidents, provosts, deans, faculties, our students, the academic institution is amazing. ...
“I'm so happy, I'm so proud for our fan base, our alumni, our donors that we have this opportunity to go into the Pac-12 to create this new Pac-12 and the opportunities that it, that it's gonna provide us.”
After a near-miss last season, the process of bringing the six teams together has been an ongoing discussion. Wicker said that the athletic directors started having conversations in July that picked up steam through August and that the week of Sept. 9 is when things “really took off” and the details that were announced Thursday were finalized.
“If you look at our metrics, our academic and research metrics, the applications that have been growing by leaps and bounds,” de la Torre said. “Now something that really holds a promise for our student athletes joining the Pac-12 and bringing our student athletes the opportunities they justly deserve.”
The long term growth potential of the move was one of the deciding factors.
According to Wicker, the opportunities for revenue generation, postseasons for football, basketball and the other sports, as well as the “massive asset” of Pac-12 Enterprises (formerly the Pac-12 Network).
As part of the financial considerations, San Diego State will be required to pay an exit fee to the Mountain West, ranging from $18 to $20 million. Reports have indicated that the Pac-12 will provide some assistance with the fees.
“We will work through how exactly, where the different pots of money are that are paying for that exit fee,” Wicker said. “I can tell you this — it won't be university funds, it won't be student fees, it won't be state money or anything like that.
"That's on me and the development team to figure that out.”
San Diego State was a founding member of the Mountain West in 1999 and both Wicker and de la Torre stressed that SDSU will be a positively contributing member of the conference until departure in 2026.
While the Pac-12 currently falls below the NCAA requirement of eight teams to qualify for postseason, reports have stated that SDSU and the other five Pac-12 member institutions would work together to determine additional programs to add.
“Between data the Pac-12 has, between data the consulting firm has, what we know in conversations," Wicker said, "we're gonna look for the two best fits for athletics, academics, who can be the most successful, who can invest in their programs and give us the best opportunity as a league to achieve greatness."
De la Torre recalled a conversation with Pac-12 commissioner Theresa Gould about the universal sentiment to be a different type of conference by putting students first in “very real” terms.
“These are institutions with exceptional academic impact, many of them in terms of social mobility and if you look at the projective impact on students and students’ success, quite remarkable,” De la Torre said. “We share these values closely in regard to students that are poor, which is part of our strategic plan.”
When asked why UNLV was not included as part of the initial expansion, de la Torre said that the decision was based on the Oregon State and Washington State presidents navigating within how the Pac-12 is positioning itself moving forward.
Another consideration is that there are multiple Aztecs teams that are either affiliate members of other conferences (men’s soccer in the WAC, women’s water polo in the GSC) or that the six Pac-12 member schools do not all have certain sports (baseball, lacrosse).
“We’ll look at it as the Pac-12 as we begin consideration of who those next schools will be, will be part of sports offerings and then whether it’s staying as an affiliate member somewhere,” Wicker said. “Or the Pac-12 looking at affiliate members depending on what that championship makeup we want to have as a conference is, that’s something we’ll be discussing over the next 20 or so months.”
Also up in the air is that the Pac-12’s media rights will be available before the Mountain West’s in 2026, with Wicker noting potential options with Warner Bros. Discovery, the CW as well as CBS and Fox’s expiring stakes in the Mountain West.
“San Diego State University and our athletic department continue to invest in being the best version of San Diego State that we can be,” Wicker said. “We want to go out and we want to put ourselves in the best situation that we possibly can to compete for championships at the conference level and then allow that to put us in the best place to do that at the national level.
“I think with just what college athletics is today and what has become over the last five years, that we've done that.”