Having grown up in PAC-10 territory, to those who didn't care much about sports, PAC-10 was as the closest think to the Ivy League on the west. For top academics in California, you wanted to go to Stanford, Berkeley or UCLA, not the ones that were not associated with the PAC. Utah comes no where near the academic level of the PAC school. Sure, sure, they have great research, but we're talking about the caliber of students and the admission rates. Not to mention graduation rates, employment rates, etc. By taking in Utah and Colorado, the PAC totally sold-out to money and football. A head scratcher since they could have taken a much better fit (at least for the UoU) in terms of academics, prestige, and tradition. The only thing that makes sense is that they wanted an easy solution and didn't want to have to think and negotiate that hard.