Whether you have made a lasting impact on brand equity yet is debatable. These things take a long time to develop. How much success is due to KW vs. the school's brand? You could be one mediocre to bad HC hire away from returning to pre-KW Utah (before 1994), or essentially the equivalent of a Washington State - occasionally competitive, but usually in the middle to bottom half of the standings. To compete at the top, you need strong brand equity - big alumni/fan base, high TV ratings, name recognition for potential recruits, etc.)

So how does the BYU decision hurt the PAC12? If you lose a valuable school to a competitor conference in your footprint, when they were yours to have, you weaken your position in the market. If you make decisions that weaken your position in the market, your conference revenue share falls behind the other conferences. If that happens, you risk the most valuable schools in your conference leaving to more greener pastures. The PAC12 could have killed the Big12. A more proactive approach to address the PAC12's declining value would have been to go after BYU and some of the Big12 schools, and ensure you dominate the western United States. But the conference couldn't see past its ideological biases, and now it finds itself with a stronger competitor making inroads into the west.

Is it unreasonable to think that USC and some others join up with the B1G, and the Big12 gets the Arizona schools? Or even that an aggressive Big12 makes a run at USC and some others to kill the PAC12? Stranger things have happened.