Pac-12 hits Mountain West with antitrust suit over poaching fee

Sam Ribakoff

(CN) — The behind-the-scenes machinations of rival college football conferences to poach teams, inflict economic damage on their competitor and come out on top, even if it means breaking antitrust laws, is just as intense as the football games themselves according to a suit filed in Northern California federal court on Tuesday.

The suit, brought by the Pac-12 Conference, a college conference of teams in the western U.S., claims rival Mountain West Conference imposed an unfair scheduling agreement and “poaching penalty” and termination fees on the Pac-12, which cost it millions of dollars when it was struggling to retain its roster of teams.

The National Collegiate Athletics Association, the nonprofit that regulates student athletics across the U.S., mandates that “top-tier” college athletic conferences have at least eight member schools on their roster, the Pac-12 says in its complaint. So, when 10 schools left the Pac-12 Conference last year only a few months until the start of the football season, the conference was left in a tight bind.

According to the complaint, Pac-12 reached an agreement with the Mountain West Conference so that their two remaining teams could play games with teams in the Mountain West Conference roster while they worked to build back up their own conference.

The agreement called for Pac-12 to pay the Mountain West Conference $14 million for a single season of college football games, plus a one-time fee of $2 million.

In addition, the agreement included a provision that would levy a $10 million fee on Pac-12 if any team from the Mountain West Conference agreed to join its roster.

“The poaching penalty is an unlawful horizontal restraint on competition. It nakedly restricts competition for MWC member schools for one particular competitor: the Pac-12. Not coincidentally, the Pac-12 is the most logical competitor conference for members of the MWC to join, given the geographic proximity and makeup of the universities,” the Pac-12 says in its complaint.

Pac-12 claims the agreement violates both the federal Sherman Act, California’s antitrust law and the state’s unfair competition law, because the agreement hampers its ability to regrow its roster given the threat of penalties if a Mountain West Conference team decides to cross over.

This year, Pac-12 added four Mountain West Conference teams to its roster for the 2026-2027 season: Boise State University, California State University, Fresno, Colorado State University, and San Diego State University. The same day the teams were admitted, the Mountain West Conference demanded $43 million for poaching the teams, the Pac-12 says.

“The Mountain West Conference’s attempt to charge the Pac-12 exorbitant poaching penalties as a condition for scheduling football games is unfair, anticompetitive, and unlawful. We’re proud to represent the Pac-12 in standing up for fair competition on and off the field,” Eric MacMichael, an attorney for Pac-12, said in an emailed statement.

Pac-12 wants the court to find the agreement and its poaching penalty unlawful and unenforceable, and bar the Mountain West Conference from enforcing it.

In an emailed statement, Mountain West Conference commissioner Gloria Nevarez noted the Pac-12 entered the agreement freely and never said anything about laws being violated.

"To say that the Mountain West was taking advantage of the Pac-12 could not be farther from the truth," Nevarez wrote. "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 has taken advantage of our willingness to help them and enter into a scheduling agreement with full acknowledgment and legal understanding of their obligations. Now that they have carried out their plan to recruit certain Mountain West schools, they want to walk back what they legally agreed to. There has to be a consequence to these types of actions.”