Three months ago, the Pac-12 began legal proceedings against the Mountain West over the poaching penalties included in their scheduling agreement for the 2024 season. The lawsuit called the $55 million penalty anticompetitive and asked the court to declare it “invalid and unenforceable.”
Predictably, the Mountain West responded with a motion to dismiss the case, claiming the Pac-12 failed “to allege any harm to competition or to itself.”
The latest move came Monday in the Northern District of California, where the Pac-12 filed its opposition to the motion to dismiss the case — a response to the response, essentially.
It reads, in part:
“After the Pac-12 accepted applications from five current MWC members to join the Pac-12 beginning in 2026, the MWC sought to enforce this illegal Poaching Penalty by demanding $55 million from the Pac-12—an amount the MWC knows will cripple the Pac-12 moving forward and thwart further competition for member schools.
“Now, the MWC asks the Court to close its eyes while the MWC runs roughshod over basic legal principles promoting fair competition. The Court should reject the MWC’s effort and deny the motion to dismiss.”
The document, obtained by the Hotline from court filings, takes issue with the Mountain West’s categorization of the poaching penalty as “ancillary” to the scheduling agreement — that the former was a necessary component of the latter.
It argues that the poaching penalty was, in fact, “entirely unrelated to scheduling football games and designed to limit the Pac-12’s ability to compete with the MWC for years into the future, even after the Scheduling Agreement has expired.”
The scheduling agreement created six games against the Mountain West for both Washington State and Oregon State in the 2024 season, when the schools were forced to compete as a two-team conference.
(Their purgatorial state will end in the summer of 2026, when Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Utah State and Gonzaga, as a non-football member, join the rebuilt Pac-12.
The conference must add at least one more full-time member to meet NCAA requirements and is expected to make a move this spring.)
The poaching penalty included in the scheduling agreement called for the Pac-12 to pay the Mountain West a baseline figure of $10 million for every team that joined the Pac-12, with a $500,000 increase for each subsequent school.
With five schools making the jump, the penalty is $55 million.
Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez defended her conference after the lawsuit was initially filed in September.
“The (poaching) provision was put in place to protect the Mountain West Conference from this exact scenario,” Nevarez said in a statement. “At no point in the contracting process did the Pac-12 contend that the agreement that it freely entered into violated any laws.”
But a letter to Nevarez from Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould in September, obtained by the Hotline through a court record request, seemingly indicates the Pac-12 opposed the poaching penalty in real time.
Gould wrote that the Mountain West imposed the fees “over the Pac-12’s objection” during the fall of 2023, when the Cougars and Beavers were “desperate to schedule football games” and “had little leverage to reject this clear restraint on competition.”
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The lawsuit argues that the poaching penalty was designed “to stifle” competition and create an “artificial barrier to entry” for schools to join the Pac-12 — a barrier that also harms the Mountain West’s own members by limiting their market value in college football realignment.
The Pac-12 is not seeking damages.
Any reduction in, or elimination of the poaching penalties could clear cash for the Pac-12 to use to lure additional members by the NCAA deadline (July 1, 2026).
Meanwhile, the Mountain West is counting on the $55 million to compensate its remaining schools for the damages caused by the defections of the five members.
A hearing is scheduled for March 25, according to a case timeline approved by U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen.
In a separate development, Colorado State and Utah State initiated legal action last month against the Mountain West over the exit fees imposed on the schools departing to the Pac-12.
Yahoo was the first to report the complaint, which included a letter sent by all five schools to Nevarez.
“The Conference’s attempt to impose the Exit Fee on the Five Institutions is improper and unenforceable,” the letter says. “The exit fee, which is completely untethered to any harm to the Conference from a member’s departure, is clearly designed to punish departing members and is therefore invalid as a matter of law.”
To stabilize itself, the Mountain West has added UTEP as a full member, UC Davis and Grand Canyon in all sports except football and Northern Illinois as a football-only member.
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