The Pac-12 Conference has signed a media rights deal with the CW, CBS and ESPN to air Oregon State’s and Washington State’s home football games for the 2025 season. A renewal with the Nexstar-owned CW, along with new pacts with CBS and ESPN, were made in hopes of agreeing to larger deals in a year when the conference is set to undergo a massive expansion.
In the deal, the CW will broadcast nine games while CBS (along with streamer Paramount+) and ESPN will have two games apiece. The arrangement is similar to the 2024 deal—the Nexstar broadcaster had nine games while Fox had rights to the remaining four home contests.
Financial details were not disclosed, with the league citing ongoing negotiations for long-term broadcast partnerships. Octagon, which the Pac-12 hired in an advisory role back in November, helped negotiate the 2025 deals.
In July 2026, Oregon State and Washington State will be joined by five schools that are currently part of the Mountain West Conference—Boise State, Colorado State, San Diego State, Fresno State and Utah State—and a sixth in Gonzaga, the longtime power of the West Coast Conference. Since Gonzaga does not have football, the Pac-12 will need to at least one more full-time member with football to qualify for the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).
The two CW telecasts on Sept. 6 (Week 2) are previews of the new Pac-12 with Oregon State hosting Fresno State and San Diego State visiting Washington State. The current Pac-12 members will also face off in a rare conference home-and-home series, with both games being played in November.
Pac-12 football, even with just two schools, averaged 431,000 viewers across 11 telecasts on the CW last fall, and it made for five of the network’s six most-watched college football games. The broadcaster also holds rights to ACC football, but the Pac-12 games often outperformed the larger conference in viewership.
CW has been a modest player in sports media rights. The broadcaster is in the first year of a seven-year, $800 million pact with NASCAR’s Xfinity Series, the second highest level of stock-car racing in the U.S. The CW is also the exclusive home to WWE’s NXT, the wrestling promoter’s third brand outside of Raw and Smackdown, and newly launched track league Grand Slam Track, which hosted its first event earlier this month.
The 2025 arrangement also marks the Pac-12’s return to ESPN after the mass exodus of 10 schools before the 2024 football season. The relationship between the conference and network was previously severed when USC and UCLA announced their intentions to leave for the Big Ten in 2022. During the ongoing media rights talks that summer, ESPN offered $30 million per school; the Pac-12 (then led by George Kliavkoff as commissioner) countered ESPN’s offer by asking for an additional $20 million for each school, causing ESPN to walk away completely.
The CBS telecasts will mark the first time that the Tiffany network will have rights to any incarnation of the Pac-12 since holding rights to Pac-10 games in the 1980s.
