
Conference Realignment: What Does It Mean for Student-Athletes at Arizona’s Universities?
By Bailey Stoltzfus. Arizona State and the University of Arizona Are Joining the Big 12 in 2024 In August 2023, news broke that Arizona and Arizona State had applied and been accepted to join the Big 12 athletic conference. The Wildcats and Sun Devils are currently members of the Pac-12 conference, but it had been presumed that, if the two schools decided to leave the Pac-12, they would preserve the Territorial Cup rivalry and leave together. The move was the latest in a series of conference realignment moves that had begun in 2021 when Texas and Oklahoma announced their move from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference (SEC). The Arizona schools’ fellow Pac-12 members, USC and UCLA, decided to join the midwest-based Big Ten a year later, setting off…