Update: Pac-10 adds Utah as 12th member

In a move anticipated since Monday, the Pacific-10 Conference announced on Thursday that it would add the University of Utah as the conference’s 12th member. The Utes are the second team the Pac-10 has added this month, following the addition of Colorado last week.

The addition of Colorado and Utah is the first expansion by the Pac-10 since 1978.

For the Utes, who are coming from the Mountain West Conference, the move is an opportunity to gain a bigger national profile and annual opportunities to play in Bowl Championship Series (BCS) games. Utah has been a “BCS buster” in the past, and jumped at the opportunity to join a conference that had an automatic bid to the BCS.

Football, the sport which drove much of the expansion negotiations, will be dramatically impacted by the realignment. Under NCAA rules, the conference can now stage a championship game at the end of the season, since it now has 12 teams. When the two new schools integrate into the conference, the new Pac-12 will split into two divisions, with the division champions playing each other for the conference’s championship and Rose Bowl bid.

No official announcement has yet been made about the structure of the divisions.

One possible alignment is a North-South split, where one division is comprised of Washington, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford and California, with the second comprised of UCLA, Southern California, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah. However, under this scenario schools in the North Division would lose their annual trips to Southern California, which is the conference’s most fertile recruiting ground. A second possibility would split each of the conference’s rivalry pairs into separate divisions. Each team would play all five teams in its division, plus three games against schools from the other division, one of which would always be a game against that school’s rival. Under this proposal, Stanford would be placed in a division with Washington State, Oregon State, USC, Arizona State and Utah, and would play those five schools, the Big Game against Cal and two other Pac-12 schools in football every year.

Colorado and Utah will begin competing in the Pac-10 in all sports starting in the 2011-2012 academic year.

Adding two schools and a conference championship game should give the new Pac-12 increased clout in negotiations for new media contracts at the end of this year. The conference is looking to come closer to conferences like the Big Ten in terms of revenue. Last season, Pac-10 schools received between $8 and $10 million from the conference, less than half of what each Big Ten member school received.