While it is primarily an athletic conference there is a lot of academic cooperation that occurs between member schools and the amount of money generated by the research performed dwarfs the amount of money generated by athletics. For the PAC12 it is governed by the PAC-12 Academic Leadership Coalition,
http://pac12alc.org, for the BIG it is the Big Ten Academic Alliance,
https://www.btaa.org.
I guarantee that the presidents of these universities are more concerned about the amount and quality of research being done than they are about the records of their football teams. The amount of money that research brings into these schools is far larger than the amount that athletics brings.