In its final season as a major conference, the Pac-12 didn't go out with a whimper. It went out slinging.
The 2023 campaign — the last before realignment swallowed the conference whole — was a showcase so absurdly loaded at the quarterback position that it reads more like a cheat code than a football season. Three of the quarterbacks who took snaps that fall have since been selected first overall in the NFL Draft. Others went in the first round. Some are still playing. And one, improbably, just became the most decorated college football player in the country before even leaving his conference's shadow. If you missed the Pac-12 in 2023, you missed something that doesn't come around twice.
The Headliners
Start with Caleb Williams, because everyone did. The USC signal-caller had already won the 2022 Heisman in arguably the most electric individual campaign in college football history — 4,075 yards, 37 touchdowns, four interceptions — and arrived in 2023 with the weight of inevitability hanging off his shoulder pads. He finished that season with 3,633 yards, 30 touchdowns, and a first-team All-Pac-12 nod that felt almost perfunctory given what everyone already knew. The Chicago Bears made it official in April 2024: Williams, first overall, the beginning of something expected to be generational on the North Side.
What nobody fully expected was that Williams wouldn't even be the most talked-about Pac-12 quarterback in 2023. That distinction, in terms of sheer week-to-week drama, belonged to Bo Nix and Michael Penix Jr. — two veterans who'd each flamed out elsewhere and found rebirth under the Pacific sun.
Nix arrived at Oregon as a cautionary tale. Three seasons at Auburn, never cracking 3,000 yards, throwing 16 interceptions across his tenure. Then Eugene happened. Under Dan Lanning, Nix became a completely different player — methodical, efficient, operating with a poise his Auburn tenure never suggested he possessed. In 2023, he threw for 4,218 yards and 33 touchdowns while leading the Ducks to a Pac-12 championship, posting a completion percentage that led the FBS and running an offense that simply refused to make mistakes. The Denver Broncos took him 12th overall in 2024, part of the most quarterback-loaded first round in NFL Draft history, when six signal-callers went in the first 12 picks.
Penix was the other half of the conference's quarterback rivalry, and in terms of raw arm talent, many scouts quietly argued he was the most dangerous passer of the bunch. The Washington lefty — a transfer from Indiana, of all places — put together a 4,218-yard, 36-touchdown season for Kalen DeBoer's Huskies, leading them to an undefeated regular season and a College Football Playoff berth. His pinpoint accuracy on vertical routes was the kind of thing that makes defensive coordinators reconsider their career choices. The Atlanta Falcons stunned the league by taking him eighth overall — despite having just signed Kirk Cousins to a $180 million contract — a move that raised eyebrows at the time and continues to generate debate to this day.
The Supporting Cast That Wasn't Supporting
Here's what made 2023 genuinely unprecedented: the guys outside the top three weren't depth. They were headliners on any other roster in any other conference in any other year.
Washington State's Cam Ward was putting together the kind of season — big arm, electric athleticism, the confidence of a man who has never once considered that a throw might not work — that would eventually make him the first overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft after a senior season at Miami. In Pullman, Ward gave Pac-12 defenses fits with 3,230 yards and 23 touchdowns, completing 65 percent of his throws for a Cougars program that had no business competing with the conference's royalty. He did anyway. The Tennessee Titans made him the top pick in 2025, and he set an NCAA Division I record with 158 career touchdown passes across Incarnate Word, Washington State, and Miami. Not bad for a zero-star recruit.
Shedeur Sanders, playing for his father Deion at Colorado in their chaotic, attention-consuming first year in the Pac-12, posted 3,230 yards and 27 touchdowns while essentially operating behind a sieve and still completing 69 percent of his passes. He earned a Pro Bowl nod in 2025 after landing in the NFL Draft — a career arc that still feels like something out of a sports movie with a third-act twist. Oregon State's D.J. Uiagalelei, who couldn't quite crack the Clemson starting job long-term, found his footing in Corvallis and compiled one of the most quietly impressive win records in college football history as a starter. He now holds a spot on the Chargers' quarterback depth chart.
UCLA's Dante Moore was a true freshman still learning how to run an offense and yet was already being whispered about as a future first-overall pick — a projection that looks increasingly credible as his career has developed. Arizona's Noah Fifita stepped in mid-season, threw for 23 touchdowns in eight starts averaging over 300 yards per game, and earned the Pac-12 Offensive Freshman of the Year award while announcing himself as a player to watch for years to come. And Washington State's John Mateer, who came along after Ward departed, eventually led Oklahoma to the College Football Playoff — a testament to the pipeline WSU quietly built at the position.
The One Who Came Closest to Doing It All
And then there's Fernando Mendoza. He was at Cal during that 2023 season — buried on the depth chart, grinding through film until midnight, quietly developing the tools that nobody outside Berkeley could yet see. By the time the Pac-12 had already ceased to exist as a power conference, Mendoza had transferred to Indiana, gone 16-0 under coach Curt Cignetti, won the Heisman Trophy with 3,535 yards, 41 touchdowns, and just 6 interceptions, and led the Hoosiers to a national championship over Miami — the school where his father once played alongside the very coach he'd just beaten. The Las Vegas Raiders took him first overall in the 2026 NFL Draft. He joins Joe Burrow and Cam Newton as the only players in the modern era to win the Heisman, win a national title, and go first overall in the same draft cycle. His origin story, though — that's a Pac-12 story.
What It Means
Three consecutive No. 1 overall picks from the same quarterback ecosystem — Williams in 2024, Ward in 2025, Mendoza in 2026 — is a run of production that has no modern equivalent at the college level. Add Penix and Nix going in the first round alongside Williams in 2024, and you have a single conference producing five first-round quarterbacks in two drafts from one season's worth of roster talent. The SEC gets the national championship headlines. The Big Ten is getting the eyeballs and the television money. But the Pac-12, in its death season, quietly assembled the most impactful quarterback class any conference has ever produced.
The conference is gone now — absorbed, dispersed, renamed, and regretted. Oregon and Washington play in the Big Ten. USC and UCLA do too. Colorado landed in the Big 12. Arizona followed. What was left of the Pac-12 skeleton held on as a mid-major shadow of itself. But the quarterbacks it built, developed, and launched? They're scattered across every NFL city, starting games, winning rings, and rewriting record books.
The Pac-12 didn't get a proper farewell. No ceremony, no final game declared as such, no moment of recognition proportional to what the conference actually was. But if you want to know how it's going to be remembered by anyone who watched — really watched — it won't be for the realignment drama or the TV deal that fell apart. It'll be for the fall of 2023, when every Saturday afternoon felt like a quarterback clinic, and a dying conference went out throwing the ball all over the yard.
That's not a bad way to go.
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