Pac-12 Sues Mountain West Over 'Poaching Penalty' (original) (raw)

Amid the latest westerly turbulence in college conference realignment, the Pac-12 on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit against the Mountain West, seeking declaratory judgment as to whether the latter league’s “poaching penalty” constitutes illegal price-fixing.

The lawsuit follows the recent decisions by five Mountain West members—Boise State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Colorado State and Utah State—to bolt for the Pac-12 next year, giving both conferences seven prospective members for the 2026 football season. The NCAA requires its Division I leagues to have at least eight football-playing schools, meaning both leagues would have to net one additional FBS school by then.

The Pac-12’s action, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, notes that it was most recently the victim of member abandonment, when 10 of its schools left in short succession to join the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC, leaving Washington State and Oregon State behind.

Last December, the two-member Pac-12 and Mountain West formed a football scheduling agreement, which allowed for Oregon State and Washington State to play MWC schools for the 2024-25 season in exchange for more than $14 million.

“Exploiting the Pac-12’s weakened position, the MWC extracted a heavy price,” the latest lawsuit states.

In addition to charging a “supra-competitive price to schedule football games,” the agreement included a provision that, in the event any current MWC members joined the Pac-12 in future years, the league would be required to pay liquidated damages in the form of escalating “termination fees,” between 10millionand10 million and 10millionand137.5 million.

Now, the Pac-12 argues that these penalties constitute “an unlawful horizontal restraint on competition,” and violate both federal antitrust law and California’s unfair competition statute.

“The poaching penalty was designed by the MWC to stifle this competition by imposing an artificial barrier to entry for members of the MWC to join the Pac-12,” the court filing states. “The poaching penalty thus functions in the same manner as no-poach, no-hire, and non-solicitation agreements that have been declared unlawful in this district and around the country because they suppress competition.”

In a statement, Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez pushed back against the lawsuit, arguing that the Pac-12 has only itself to blame for signing an agreement that it has since come to regret. “At no point in the contracting process did the Pac-12 contend that the agreement that it freely entered into violated any laws,” said Nevarez. “To say that the Mountain West was taking advantage of the Pac-12 could not be farther from the truth. The Mountain West Conference wanted to help the Pac-12 schools and student-athletes, but not at the expense of the Mountain West.”

The Pac-12 is asking a federal judge to declare the provision invalid and unenforceable, in addition to seeking other relief.

The conference is being represented in the matter by San Francisco-based law firm of Kreker, Van Nest & Peters, which previously represented Oregon State in its legal battle with the departing Pac-12 members over governance control of the league.

(This story has been updated with a statement from the Mountain West.)