The Pac-12’s tax return is a snapshot of the divide between Power 4 and everyone else

Two years ago, the Pac-12 distributed $46 million per school. It had 12 members, a $381 million television deal and a seat at the Power 5 table.

Then 10 programs left for the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC, and the conference was reduced to Oregon State and Washington State. The tax return for the first year of that new reality — fiscal year 2025, obtained by USA Today’s Brent Schrotenboer — shows exactly what that departure cost.

Revenue dropped from $566.6 million to $111.5 million. Television rights fees fell from $381 million to $3 million. The conference ran a $21.7 million deficit on $133.2 million in expenses. Oregon State and Washington State each received $29 million — a 37% cut from the year before.

Meanwhile, the schools that left collected immediately. UCLA and USC earned $76 million and $78 million in their first year in the Big Ten, according to that conference’s tax return. Oregon and Washington received partial first-year shares of $47 million and $48 million, with full shares coming as their membership matures.

Same sport. Same television windows. Wildly different economics — determined almost entirely by which conference logo is on the jersey.

The Pac-12 isn’t sitting still. Under commissioner Teresa Gould, the conference is adding seven full members in 2026 — Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Texas State, Utah State and Gonzaga — bringing the league to eight football programs. The new media rights portfolio includes CBS as the primary partner, a continuing relationship with The CW and a five-year deal with USA Sports. A recent CW streaming partnership with ESPN means Pac-12 games will also be available on the ESPN app. Every football game will air on linear television.

For the incoming programs, the financial upgrade is significant. Schools that earned between $3.5 million and $5.7 million in their previous conferences are joining a league that projects distributions of approximately $13.2 million per school, according to figures presented at a Washington State Board of Regents meeting. If that projection holds, it represents a two- to three-times increase over what those programs had before.

But projections aren’t paychecks. And even if the $13.2 million materializes, it lands in a very specific place on the college sports pay scale. It’s a major raise for a program coming from the Mountain West. It’s less than half of what Oregon State and Washington State received just two years ago. And it’s a fraction of the $76 to $78 million that UCLA and USC now collect in the Big Ten.

For Oregon State and Washington State, the math is blunter. They went from $46 million to $29 million and are now anchoring a conference projected at $13.2 million per school. The exit fees paid by the 10 departing programs provide a financial cushion, but the ongoing revenue trajectory represents a fundamentally different reality than what they had in the old Pac-12. They went from Power 5 distributions to something closer to a Group of 6 model — because that’s what the new Pac-12 is.

None of this means the rebuild is failing. Gould has assembled three media partners, secured linear television for every game and built a conference that will roughly triple the income of its incoming members. By any reasonable standard, the Pac-12 is doing about as well as anyone could rebuilding from two schools.

But the tax return strips away the branding and the optimism and shows the structural reality underneath. The gap between Power 4 and everyone else isn’t about effort or strategy. It’s about the television contracts that fund the entire system — and those contracts are allocated by club membership. The Pac-12’s rebuild is real. The ceiling it’s rebuilding under is, too.