Inside The Huskies

Remember the Alamo? Huskies, Others Will Have To for 2 More Seasons

Former Pac-12 teams will continue to fill bowl game tie-ins for the dismantled league.

Dan Raley

Texas Longhorns mascot Bevo XV was part of the 2022 Alamo Bowl between the UW and Texas.
Texas Longhorns mascot Bevo XV was part of the 2022 Alamo Bowl between the UW and Texas. / Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Bowl games such as the Alamo -- which over the past two years has hosted both the University of Washington football team against Texas and new Husky coach Jedd Fisch when he was at Arizona against Oklahoma -- had expressed concerns over possible matchups moving forward using former Pac-12 teams to honor conference agreements in place.

For instance, what if Arizona was selected for the postseason outing in San Antonio, which has an agreement to pair teams from the Pac-12 and Big 12, and the late December bowl game was left with nothing more than an all-Big 12 conference matchup?

However, apparently everyone is resigned to dealing with whatever emerges over the next two years of bowl play, with Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormack indicating this week that the 10 former Pac-12 teams will continue to honor the contracted Pac-12 bowl tie-ins in place where needed until 2026.

That means the UW and others will fill bowl slots on behalf of their old conference in 2024 and 2025 that involve the Alamo, Holiday, Las Vegas, Sun, Los Angeles and Independence (2024) and ESPN event bowl (2025).

This comes, of course, after the 12-team College Football Playoff field is selected each year, with the Huskies, Oregon UCLA and USC trying to get there through the Big Ten; Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah attempting to qualify as Big 12 members; and Cal and Stanford moving ahead as ACC members.

The Rose Bowl, now part of the College Football Playoff host rotation, no longer has its Pac-12-Big Ten tie-in.

Action Network's Brett McMurphy, who reported this development first, says conflict still exists because the old Pac-12 teams won't be chosen based on conference records, because there won't be any, plus Oregon State and Washington State still will have a say in filling bowl pairings.

This means the UW football team, even after joining the Big Ten for the upcoming season, won't participate in bowl games that have Big Ten agreements in place before 2026, when bowl contracts will have been renegotiated.

If all of that's not confusing enough, 247Sports recently published projected postseason pairings, before any agreements were firmly upheld, that had Washington facing Oklahoma in the Music City Bowl on Dec. 30 in Nashville -- a game that features Big Ten and SEC teams.

A postseason game like that for the Huskies, well off the Pac-12 footprint, won't happen for at least three more years.

For the latest UW football and basketball news, go to si.com/college/washington

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Dan Raley

DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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