The big local news of the past week was about college football, but it wasn’t really about the annual Beavers-Ducks football game, which is being played this Saturday (way too early in the season, in my opinion, but nobody asked me).

No, it was the news on Thursday that the Pac-12 Conference — now, of course, just Oregon State and Washington State — had raided the Mountain West Conference by persuading its four best football programs to join the Pac-12. Starting in 2026, Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State and Fresno State will be members of the Pac-12.

That still leaves the Pac-12 two members shy of the eight the NCAA requires for a conference, and so at least two additional schools must be lined up by the fall of 2026. Smart money is leaning toward UNLV and Air Force, but we’ll see. There’s been a lot of speculation that Stanford and Cal, who bolted the Pac-12 for the Atlantic Athletic Conference, might be lured back, but that’s unlikely; the ACC, despite its current woes, is not as likely to collapse as some people think.

Give credit to Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould, OSU athletics director Scott Barnes and OSU President Jayathi Murthy and their counterparts at WSU for playing a bad set of cards with a considerable amount of skill. (It helped that the conference was sitting on a $250 million stockpile of cash from various sources, which will be needed; estimates are that the Pac-12 will have to pay the Mountain West Conference around $110 million in exit fees and other poaching penalties.)

But a couple of things are worth keeping in mind: First, fans who think the Pac-12 is back on the road to rejoining the Power 4 conferences — the conferences with what amount to guaranteed slots in the College Football Playoff — likely will be disappointed, as Stewart Mandel explains in this piece from The Athletic. (Subscriptions may be necessary to access stories from The Athletic.)

Mandel writes: “No one should be under any delusion that this new conference will be viewed in the same orbit as the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC.” But that’s not really the point, he argues: The point largely is to get the Pac-12 champion in position to claim the fifth slot reserved for conference champions in the College Football Playoff — with all the TV revenue that would come with that.

In that regard, Mandel says, the goal for a revived Pac-12 conference “should be to surpass the American Athletic Conference as the perceived strongest conference outside the Power 4.” And that might be easier than it sounds, since the top three AAC teams decamped this year for the Big 12.

A fresh media-rights deal for the Pac-12 beginning in 2026 could sweeten the pot for its schools, and Jon Wilner of the Bay Area Media Group has a notion of what the conference should shoot for: a deal that gives each of its schools at least $11 million a year. Wilner explains why in this column.

A couple of final thoughts: First, this isn’t the end — not at all — of realignment. But we’re still headed for a world divided between the haves and the have-nots in college athletics, and this is just another step in that direction. The scrambling now involves schools like OSU and WSU scrambling to say on the “have” side of the divide.

And finally: The move prompted a wave of commentary along the lines that OSU and WSU essentially were doing the same thing to the Mountain West Conference that the other schools in the Pac-12 had done to them. And there’s no way around that; the Mountain West Conference has been devastated. There’s no way to feel good about that. But in a college football world where television money rules all, OSU and WSU did what they thought they had to do to survive. Bill Oram, the lead sports columnist for The Oregonian/OregonLive, essentially made that case in this column, which I initially thought leaned a little too hard on references from “The Godfather.” But now I see his point. “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.”

That’s enough about that. Let’s tackle some other subjects this week:

After watching Tuesday’s presidential debate, you may be wondering: How can any voter be undecided in this race? Times columnist Ross Douthat provides some possible answers to answer the question. You probably won’t agree with some of his answers; I didn’t. But that’s OK.

Last weekend’s Reader linked to a piece from a New York Times columnist who argued that heat waves deserved their own names as a way to call attention to how dangerous these increasingly common weather events are. This week, Nicholas Kristof picks up the thread in this column about the more mundane (but just as dangerous) effects of climate change.

You’ll be hearing a lot about election security as we head into the heart of election season. Here are the facts: Oregon’s vote-by-mail system is remarkably safe and secure, and voter fraud is almost nonexistent. But there are lapses, as you’ll find in this Oregon Capital Chronicle story, about a state error that allowed 300 noncitizens to register to vote. Here’s what you need to remember about this story: Only two of those cast ballots — and might have become citizens by the time they did so. And the error will have no impact whatsoever on the 2024 election.

Lizzy Acker at The Oregonian/OregonLive looked at NOAA’s predictions for this fall’s weather in Oregon and came away with this conclusion: It might be cooler and wetter than normal. Or not.

The Sundance Film Festival has three finalists for a festival home beginning in 2027. The festival’s current home, Park City (and Salt Lake City) in Utah, is among the finalists, along with Boulder, Colorado and — in a bit of a surprise — Cincinnati.

Enjoying walking your dog? Of course you do. That’s because you’re not thinking about all the ways that your excursions could leave you horribly injured. This sort of thing rarely happens with cats. I’m just saying.

That’s it for this weekend. See you next weekend.