New League, New Era

Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould has a big job on her hands. With the reinvented conference debuting July 1, Gould likens her work to launching a startup. “Because the Pac-12 existed for over a hundred years, people don’t always think about it that way,” she says. “But we shut down the old Pac-12, and this is a new league. The list of priorities is long.” Gould checked a big item off that list last summer with the addition of Texas State University as the Pac-12’s ninth foundational member. We visited with Gould about the conference’s decision to invite the Bobcats and what it means for TXST and the conference.

The competitive track record of Texas State across many programs. There’s certainly a lot of national conversation around football, but it’s more than that when you look at the success of Texas State in the Sun Belt and winning the commissioner’s cup [Vic Bubas Cup]. We are a top-five conference, looking at the metrics in football, men’s basketball, and baseball, and we want to continue to compete at the highest level. Texas State has been willing and will continue to be willing to invest to compete at that level.

I think the academic aspirations of this institution and the growth that Texas State is experiencing are very much aligned with the rest of our institutions.

If you go anywhere in the country, sports fans know the Pac-12. People recognize that the conference has gone through transformational change, but the brand recognition and relevance are still there. One of the things President Damphousse has said consistently is that the association with a historic legacy conference like the Pac-12 can help elevate the Texas State brand. And I think the Pac-12 brand will really help with that. 

From a recruiting perspective, most of your students come from the state of Texas, but that’s starting to change a little bit. And I think extending the reach to the western half of the United States will help with enrollment growth and admissions with students from different parts of the country.

The advantage is our whiteboard is blank. We have the benefit of being able to start over and create something that is relevant and different than any other conference in response to what modern-day student-athletes are looking for and the changing landscape around us. We’re trying to take the historic legacy brand and then re-create it to be the modern-day conference. We own and operate a for-profit entity with Pac-12 Enterprises. How do we leverage Pac-12 Enterprises as a multimedia machine to support NIL? How can we use it as a marketing vehicle to elevate our institutions? How do we support our student-athletes? They have different expectations of their experience than they did five or 10 years ago, and we can create services that are different than other conferences in response to that.

The state of Texas brings some important elements to the table for us. There is a fandom around college sports in this state, particularly around college football, that matters. The level of talent in this state from a recruiting perspective is really important. But it would’ve only been relevant if there was an institution in the state of Texas that was aligned and on the trajectory that we were looking for. Texas State is a great fit for us.