Conference countdown keeps turning, with Yahoo’s Pac-12 slotting back into the conversation

With kickoff still a matter of days away, Yahoo Sports ran another installment of its “Can’t Wait For Saturday” conference countdown, this time framing the Pac-12’s place near the top half of a league-by-league ranking. The piece is written as an author’s personal list rather than a compilation of poll results or a projection model, but it still captures what fans have begun to obsess over most during the preseason window: how conferences stack up before the first set of games forces the rankings to either earn their way forward or fall apart quickly.

In the column, the writer describes having “ranked the teams, 1 to 40,” then zooms out to conferences, noting that 10 conferences are represented in the Football Bowl Subdivision. The countdown runs in reverse order, and the Pac-12 is positioned at No. 6 in that particular framework, with the column listing eight participating teams under the Pac-12 umbrella for the author’s methodology. That placement matters mainly as a marker of preseason perception, not as a measurable prediction, because preseason conference strength is often more about who the public expects to look sharp early than about confirmed competitive balance.

Boise State is a key part of the column’s Pac-12 segment, explicitly mentioned as part of the author’s “Yes” response for including the program in the conference countdown conversation. In other words, the piece treats Boise State not as a distant visitor, but as part of the FBS ecosystem being evaluated alongside the conferences’ core brands. The inclusion indicates what many observers anticipate in the opening weeks: non-traditional conference members can quickly change how a “conference level” of play gets discussed, especially when games are being framed as immediate tests of whether a conference is deeper than its reputation.

The column’s tone also acknowledges the social media friction that sometimes follows preseason lists, with the writer joking about being ready for “digital booing” if readers disagree with the order. That detail may seem minor, but it points to a consistent dynamic in college football: fans do not just consume these rankings, they actively contest them. As a result, preseason conference talk often acts like a rehearsal for in-season arguments, where every surprising result becomes ammunition for or against whatever position people were willing to defend before the first kickoff.

What should be taken from a piece like this is not that the Pac-12 has definitively earned the No. 6 ranking, but that the Pac-12 is still being treated as a conference with enough intrigue to keep its preseason standing in the national conversation. In preseason sports coverage, the middle-of-the-pack slots are often the most contested, because they imply both opportunity and uncertainty. A conference placed in that range can plausibly be either closer to the top tier than skeptics think or farther from it than supporters hope, depending on what happens in early non-conference matchups and the first wave of divisional games.

The practical question for fans is what these perceptions will collide with once games begin. If the Pac-12’s projected balance holds in the opening weeks, the “middle-to-upper” preseason positioning can start to look like a reasonable baseline. If not, the debate will quickly shift from how conferences are ranked by writers to how they are ranked by wins and losses, with early results either strengthening the argument that the Pac-12 belongs where it landed or forcing a re-evaluation.

Until then, the column functions as a snapshot of preseason confidence, not a standings forecast. The next step is watching which conference narratives survive contact with Saturday, especially around the Pac-12’s place in the FBS hierarchy, and how programs like Boise State are framed once opponents and game film remove the ambiguity preseason lists inevitably carry.