Pac-12 Conference
American collegiate athletics conference

The Pac-12 Conference is a collegiate athletic conference in the Western United States. It participates at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level for all sports, and its football teams compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), the highest level of NCAA football competition. The conference currently consists of nine full-member institutions located in the states of California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington.
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" (a phrase coined by former Washington State basketball coach George Raveling), the Pac-12 has won more NCAA national championships in team sports than any other conference in history. Washington's national title in women's rowing in 2017 was the 500th NCAA championship won by a Pac-12 school. The Pac-12 holds a 200-plus championship lead over the second-place conference.
Following the departure of ten members during the 2021–2026 NCAA conference realignment, the conference temporarily operated with Oregon State and Washington State as its only full members during the 2024–25 and 2025–26 academic years.
“Pac-12 Conference” enters the record as american collegiate athletics conference. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pac-12, Conference and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128471. VIAF identifies the subject as 144253363. The Library of Congress control number is n81030189. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 2 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 2011, 2017 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pac-12 Conference” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.