When other conferences moved fast, the Pac-12 is still sitting on its pro athlete eligibility rule

Six conferences have made their call. The Pac-12 has not.

In the span of a week the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, Mountain West and now the American Conference all adopted rules barring athletes who declared for a pro draft and signed a pro contract or landed on a pro roster from returning to college football.

The MW’s version came together fast; a unanimous board vote and a statement issued the same Thursday night the ACC made its own move.

The Pac-12 has had the same information sitting in front of it since Jon Rothstein first reported the league was discussing its options back on August 26.

Nine days is a long time to discuss.

The pileup nobody saw coming

This didn’t come out of nowhere.

Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris walking out of NFL training camps in Cleveland and New Orleans to chase a reunion with Lane Kiffin at LSU is what lit the fuse.

A Texas court ruling also gave the 2022 recruiting class a shot at a fifth season and suddenly every roster in the country had a version of that same question hanging over it.

Conferences that usually take months to agree on a bowl tie-in found consensus in 48 hours. That’s the backdrop the Pac-12 is operating against and it’s why its silence reads louder than it would in a normal off-season.

What’s Pac-12 weighing?

The league hasn’t published a rule yet, but the considerations on the table look familiar.

How broad should the ban run; football-only like the Mountain West or every sponsored sport like the Big 12?

How does a conference-level rule hold up against a court that just told the SEC its own version couldn’t stand; at least for the 40-plus players named in that Dallas County case?

And with the Pac-12’s rebuilt nine-team league barely two months old, there’s a real question of what kind of precedent it wants to set in its first real test as a governing body.

Those aren’t different questions than the ones the Mountain West, the ACC or the American answered inside a day. It’s the same questions. The difference is just the speed, of course.

A legal landscape nobody has settled

That Texas ruling also matters here.

Judge Martin Hoffman didn’t strike down every conference’s rule; he paused the SEC’s specifically. Reporting suggests it could become a template for challenges elsewhere.

Rick Karcher, Eastern Michigan’s athletics representative and a former sports attorney, boiled it down in an AP story last week: conferences have the legal right to set their own eligibility rules and he doesn’t expect schools to break from them even while court fights play out elsewhere.

It’s a big deal for a conference like the Mountain West.

A power conference can afford a drawn out legal fight. A mid-major generally can’t. So having a clean legal basis to just make the rule and expect schools to follow it without waiting on a judge to sort out the SEC’s mess first is exactly the kind of certainty why a league like the MW needed to move fast.

The view from the MW sideline

Coaches inside the conferences that already acted aren’t losing sleep over the reasoning. SJSU’s Ken Niumatalolo put it plainly when asked about the MW’s rule and the wider trend behind it.

“The ruling our conference made and that everybody made is the right one in my mind,” said Niumatalolo .“It’s just a little weird to go and come back. It doesn’t seem right.”

That’s the sentiment driving six conferences to move fast. Whether the Pac-12 lands in the same place or writes its own version of the rule, the pressure from locker rooms and coaching staffs isn’t pointing toward more delay.

Thursday is the deadline that matters now

Whatever the reasoning, the waiting has a shelf life.

The Pac-12 is expected to have something to say this Thursday and by then it will be the last conference of consequence still without a stated position.

Fair or not, a Thursday announcement puts the Pac-12 roughly a week and a half behind a Group of Six league that had its answer buttoned up hours after seeing the ACC move first.

For a conference trying to establish itself as a serious player in this new landscape that gap is worth watching.