Amid the latest southwest turmoil in school event realignment, the Pac-12 on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit against the Mountain West, seeking declaratory judgment as to whether the former league’s “poaching penalty” constitutes improper price-fixing.
The petition follows the recent choices by five Mountain West members—Boise State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Colorado State and Utah State—to bolt for the Pac-12 next year, giving both events seven potential members for the 2026 soccer time. Both Division I leagues would need to shield one more FBS school by that point because the NCAA mandates that Division I teams have at least eight football-playing colleges.
The Pac-12’s motion, filed in the U. S. District Court for the Northern District of California, notes that it was most recently the target of associate abandonment, when 10 of its schools left in quick succession to visit the Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC, leaving Washington State and Oregon State on.
Last December, the two-member Pac-12 and Mountain West formed a football scheduling agreement, which allowed for Oregon State and Washington State to play MWC schools for the 2024-25 season in exchange for more than$ 14 million.
” Exploiting the Pac-12’s weakened place, the MWC extracted a large price”, the latest complaint says.
In addition to” supra-competitive price to schedule football games,” the agreement stipulated that the league would be required to pay liquidated damages in the form of escalating “termination fees” between$ 10 million and$ 137.5 million in the event any current MWC members join the Pac-12 in the future.
Today, the Pac-12 argues that these penalties constitute” an unconstitutional vertical restraint on competitors”, and violate both national antitrust law and California’s cruel competition statute.
The MWC’s proposed hunting penalty was intended to suppress this competition by creating an artificial entry barrier for MWC members to meet the Pac-12, according to the court filing. Because they impede opposition,” the poaching penalty functions in the same way as no-poach, no-hire, and non-solicitation contracts that have been declared unconstitutional in this area and throughout the nation.”
Gloria Nevarez, the Mountain West director, refrained from opposing the lawsuit in a statement, claiming that the Pac-12 is only to responsible for signing an arrangement that it has since since regretted. Nowhere in the outsourcing process did the Pac-12 assert that the free-flowing agreement violated any laws, according to Nevarez. It could not be further from the wisdom to claim that the Mountain West was profiting from the Pac-12. The Mountain West Conference wanted to help the Pac-12 institutions and student-athletes, but not at the cost of the Mountain West”.
The Pac-12 is asking a provincial judge to consider the clause illegitimate and illegal, in addition to seeking additional comfort.
The event is being represented by the San Francisco-based Kreker, Van Nest &, Peters, which formerly represented Oregon State in its legal dispute with the departing Pac-12 people over leadership power of the group.
( This story has a statement from the Mountain West updated. )