Tulane Green Wave AD Reveals Reasons for Turning Down Pac-12 Offer
It was uncertainty, more than anything, that led the Tulane Green Wave and its American Athletic Conference mates to turn down the Pac-12 Conference when it offered membership last week.
Green Wave athletic director David Harris opened up about the process for the first time with the New Orleans Times-Picayune recently.
Tulane, Memphis, USF and UTSA all opted to reaffirm their commitment to the American Athletic Conference after listening to an offer to join the Pac-12, which has taken in four Mountain West members for the 2026-27 season. The league has since added one more Mountain West member to bring their membership to seven.
That conference had 12 members two years ago. But, last year 10 of them committed to joining three other conferences and left Oregon State and Washington State as the only remaining members. The Pac-12 has two years to reach eight members for football or it will no longer be considered a conference under NCAA rules.
Harris said this is a different situation than joining, say, the SEC, which is an established league that hasn’t lost a member in decades. There was also uncertainty in TV revenue, as the Pac-12 does not have a TV deal for its new configuration. Tulane also considered the additional travel cost, as more than half of the league would be outside the central time zone.
“But in this case, you’ve got to look at what are the future prospects of this league that’s really just resurrecting and whether or not you feel it is going to continue to be stable and grow and prosper over the next several years,” Harris said. “You’re dealing with information that often times is speculation. You don’t have any guarantees about exactly what it’s going to be.”
One of the sticking points, per reporting, was that the Pac-12 was only willing to cover $2.5 million of the reported $27 million exit costs for each team, as the AAC requires 27 months notice to leave the league.
Harris said he and Tulane president Michael Fitts spoke regularly during the process and that it wasn’t just an athletics decision.
The level of communication between Tulane and the other three schools was also unusual in this situation. Reportedly, Memphis was the key school in the deal and how the Tigers went, others would go. The group of athletic directors not only spoke by phone but were together in person at a national conference when conversations first began.
“I was really impressed that almost from the very beginning, my phone began to ring with calls from the other ADs in the league to talk about the (Pac-12) opportunity and see if we were on a different page or the same page,” he said.
The schools were on the same page. For now, they’re staying put.
