ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) views USC as the overwhelming favorite to win the Pac-12 championship in 2023.

Five programs have at least an 8.9% chance to win the league, according to the predictive model, but the Trojans have the best percentage chance at 41%. The back-to-back reigning champion Utah Utes have the third-best odds behind USC and Oregon.

Interestingly enough, Oregon State is more likely to win the Pac-12 than Washington, which returns last year’s leading passer Michael Penix Jr. The Huskies went 11-2 last year under Kalen DeBoer and open the 2023 season inside the AP Top 10. They’ve spent the offseason talking about winning a national championship and will surely have a say about who makes it to the conference title game in December.

Oregon is the wild card. The Ducks won 10 games under Dan Lanning in Year 1. But they also lost to Oregon State and Washington, and the offense has been remade this offseason. Offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham has departed, as have four of the Ducks’ top five offensive linemen.

FPI likes the talent that still resides in Eugene, though. Oregon has an 18.4% chance to win the league and a 7.4% chance to earn a spot in the College Football Playoff.

At the other end of the conference, FPI gives Deion Sanders’ remade Colorado squad a 0.0% chance to win the league.

With an unprecedented amount of roster turnover, Colorado has sort of broken the formula most use to construct preseason predictive models. There’s virtually no returning production from last year’s 1-11 squad, and we’re still trying to find a quantitative way to measure incoming transfers’ impact on their new teams. Colorado could be much better than it was last season, or it could take Sanders’ team a bit longer to mesh on the field.

The Pac-12 certainly isn’t hurting for storylines this upcoming season.

Here’s each team’s percentage chance to win the conference title, via FPI:

  • USC (41.0%)
  • Oregon (18.4%)
  • Utah (17.6%)
  • Oregon State (9.5%)
  • Washington (8.9%)
  • UCLA (2.7%)
  • Cal (0.9%)
  • Arizona (0.5%)
  • Washington State (0.3%)
  • Arizona State (0.2%)
  • Stanford (0.1%)
  • Colorado (0.0%)