Pac-10 Expansion: Larry Scott Officially Invites the Utah Utes

Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott has officially invited the University of Utah to join the conference to be it's 12th member on Wednesday.

This invite comes just two days after Texas rejected the offer to join the Pac-10, with Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State following suite.

Late last week, the university of Colorado jumped at the Pac-10's offer to join the league, being the first of two teams to leave the Big 12 conference. Nebraska soon followed, leaving for the Big Ten.

The super-conference idea of the Pac-16 was killed (for now), but the league has been on the search for a 12th team in order to be eligible to hold a conference championship game, a necessity if a Pac-10 TV network is to be formed in the future.

Utah's board of trustees is set to discuss and vote on the possible move on Thursday. Nothing is certain at this time, but sources close to ESPN state that they are likely to accept the invitation.

Following the board meeting, Utah has scheduled a news conference at 3 p.m. eastern time at the Ute's football stadium.

Utah, who had joined the Mountain West Conference in 1999 in it's creation, has been one of the conference's most successful schools in both football and basketball. The new addition of Boise State to the Mountain West, effective in 2011, was highly anticipated to bring an automatic BCS bid while playing with teams such as Utah, BYU and TCU.

If Utah does make the move, it could once again kill the hopes of the Mountain West gaining their much-wanted BCS bid, but would solve Utah's problems of not being considered a BCS team. It will also hurt the MWC in that they are losing the Salt Lake City TV market, the 31st largest in the country.

With the Big 12 schools' rejection to the move out west was not necessarily a loss for the Pac-10. They still come out on top (so to speak) gaining two big TV markets, Denver and Salt Lake City, in their quest to catch up with the Big 10 network's revenue.

If the University of Utah were to leave the Mountain West Conference, they would not be subject to any exit fees, per conference rules.