SAN MARCOS, TX – Three years ago, Texas State was coming off its eighth straight losing season. On July 1, 2026, the Bobcats officially become members of the Pac-12. 

Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse can see everything San Marcos has to offer from his perch on the 10th floor of the J.C. Kellum Administration Building. The old fish hatcheries. The San Marcos River. Sewell Park. Potential.  

In the fall of 2024, he saw an opportunity created from chaos. As the Pac-12 rebuilt following a wave of departures, the conference still needed additional football members to maintain official status. The Mountain West and American Conference were also facing uncertainty of their own, creating multiple potential landing spots for ambitious programs looking to move up. 

Damphousse quickly began building relationships with Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould, who he didn’t know, and Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez, who he did know. He described the process as a “middle school dance” because he wanted to show interest without appearing desperate. 

As he learned what conferences were seeking, Texas State pitched its case through conversations and presentations, highlighting its upcoming R1 status, massive enrollment, growing profile, and the value of having a presence in Texas. 

 “You don’t apply. There is no application form,” Damphousse explained. “But when the music stops, I wanted to make sure that Texas State has a chair somewhere.”

Texas State’s current chair was in the Sun Belt Conference, which it joined in 2013 as a second-year member of the FBS. Damphousse has deep roots in the SBC after serving as the President of the Sun Belt during his time as the Arkansas State University Chancellor. He helped save the league in 2022 by adding four new teams. 

But he always thought the Bobcats were an outlier as the lone Texas team in a conference that was based in the southeast. He thought conference realignment was a chance to fix the geography for Texas State, or at least make travel easier. Flying to San Diego State and Boise State is far, but it beats flying to Memphis and then busing to Jonesboro or flying into Shreveport and then busing to Monroe. 

Damphousse also saw it as an opportunity to find more television revenue and change the profile of Texas State’s peer institutions. Yet, he knew it was a delicate situation. He was only flirting with new conferences and he didn’t want to jeopardize his, or Texas State’s, relationship with the Sun Belt. 

“I love the Sun Belt. I helped build the Sun Belt,” Damphousse said. “I was the chair of the board when we brought in the four schools and moved to 14 members and am very proud of what we’ve done there, but the TV revenue just was not very good.”

The next big break came in September 2024 when the Pac-12 added Utah State to get within one team of official conference status and the three American Conference schools announced they were staying put. Now, he had an in with the Pac-12 and decided to go all-in on joining that conference. 

Damphousse spent the 2024 football season calling Pac-12 presidents while athletic director Don Coryell worked on his counterparts across the league. Together, they pitched Texas State as a sleeping giant - one with more than 44,000 students, a prime location between Austin and San Antonio, and a football awakening under head coach G.J. Kinne. 

But not much happened, at least on the surface. Damphousse compared it to a duck on water that looks calm above the surface even though it is pedaling like crazy below it. He’d spontaneously post duck GIFs on social media as a hint that the conversations were ongoing even if progress wasn’t public. 

That changed on Father’s Day 2025 when news broke that Texas State was the favorite to take the eighth spot in the Pac-12. That was great news for Damphousse and the Bobcats, but it also put them up against the clock. The buyout to leave the SBC jumped from $5 million to $10 million after July 1. Ironically, it was Damphousse who proposed such a steep buyout when he was on the board with the Sun Belt. 

That gave him two weeks to get the official invite and meet with Texas State’s Board of Regents to approve the buyout. He negotiated it all from his lake house north of Greers Ferry Lake in Arkansas, sporting a summer beard and all. By June 30, the board approved the $5 million buyout and the Bobcats announced that they were officially joining the Pac-12 starting on July 1, 2026. 

“It was just like what Ernest Hemingway said about going bankrupt,” Damphousse joked. “Gradually, then suddenly.” 

***

When Damphousse was hired as the university president in the summer of 2022, he was given a list of bullet points to attack. The first was to raise the university’s national profile. The last was to fix football.

Damphousse knew it was in the wrong order. Fixing football was the key to raising the national profile of any university. 

Coryell knew it, too. He first arrived at Texas State in 2004 as the Executive Senior Associate Athletics Director for External Operations and was responsible for marketing and promotional campaigns, ticket and sales operations, and much more. He became the athletics director in 2021. 

His very first football game in San Marcos was an 11 a.m. kickoff against FAU. The Owls were transitioning to FBS and Coryell remembers thinking that it would be a big game that drew a big crowd. And then he walked into Bobcat Stadium and realized that he was mistaken. 

But in 2005, Coryell began to see the potential. Head coach David Bailiff and quarterback Barrick Nealy led Texas State to a share of the Southland Conference title and to the FCS semifinals. He worked closely with the ticket office back then and he’d almost get run over by students as he passed out the final tickets on campus. 

“That’s when the chatter started that we should be an FBS program and not just an FCS program,” he said. “The 2005 season was the first time where I started thinking about the possibilities. I saw the support this place was generating when we were doing well and that’s when my eyes started opening up about the potential of this place.”

But the transition wasn’t easy, at least on the football field. Dennis Franchione led Texas State to a 20-28 record over its first four seasons in the FBS. The Bobcats were bowl eligible in 2013 and 2014, but never received a bowl invite, something that Coryell believes hurt the program’s trajectory more than was realized at the time. 

Everett Withers arrived as the head coach in 2016 and never found his footing. After a 7-28 record over three years, he was replaced by Jake Spavital. He went 13-35 over four seasons and was let go at the end of the 2022 season, which was the eighth straight year under .500 for the program. 

“We couldn’t get out of the rut,” Coryell admitted. “It is so easy to lose once you start losing. Once you’re in a losing culture, it’s just so hard to turn that around. The first decade was rough, but the potential never left. And we knew that if we were going to continue to progress, we had to find a way to fix football.” 

Coryell and Damphousse knew how important the hire was following Spavital’s firing. They had to get it right. There was opportunity on the horizon and the football program was serving as an anchor, not a sail. 

When asked for a turning point in his quest to fix football, Damphousse stands up in his office and looks out the window towards Bobcat Stadium, now sponsored by UFCU. He recalls looking over Jim Wacker Field during Kinne’s in-person interview and realizing it was a pivotal moment for the university. 

And within five minutes of that in-person interview, both Damphousse and Coryell knew they found the missing piece to the puzzle. 

“I knew that if the right guy gets this job, we can be something special,” Damphousse said. “And I remember thinking, this is the right guy.”

Kinne’s first game as the head coach at Texas State was a road trip to Baylor. The Bears were two years removed from winning the Big 12 championship and beating Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl. Texas State, conversely, hadn’t won more than four games in a single season since 2014. Baylor closed as a 26.5-point favorite and Texas State was +2400 to win the game outright. 

But Coryell was confident. He’s the type of athletic director that likes to pop into his coaches’ offices the week of games and ask how they’re feeling. He’ll even find them in the offseason and go through the schedule, highlighting what he sees as certain wins and what he views as question marks. He says some coaches love it. He also admits that some don’t. 

Kinne loves it. And the week of that Baylor game, he knew something that others didn’t yet – the Bobcats had a chance. He told that to Coryell, and by the third quarter of the 42-31 upset win over the Bears, Coryell believed him. It was the biggest win for Texas State since joining the FBS and proof of concept for Kinne. 

The Bobcats were always described as sleeping giants. The victory in Waco opened their eyes. 

“That was confirmation that everything I had believed since December was coming true,” Damphousse said about the win over Baylor. “That was the beginning of this.” 

***

Damphousse speaks to prospective football players on Saturdays at breakfast during official visits. He wasn’t sure what to say the first time he did it back in 2023, so he’d point out that Texas State had never reached a bowl game before and that they had an opportunity to join something on the ground floor. They could help build Texas State into a winner alongside Kinne. 

After the third Saturday, Kinne approached Damphousse and told him to find a new sales pitch. These young recruits had no idea about Texas State’s history of success, or lack thereof, and that Kinne wasn’t trying to play up that angle. Damphousse changed tactics for the rest of 2023, and in December of that year, Kinne ended the narrative by beating Rice in the First Responder Bowl. 

His sales pitch is no longer about reaching bowl games or building a winning culture. His dreams are much bigger. And before you write them off as delusional, remember how the news of Texas State joining the Pac-12 would’ve sounded when he arrived in the summer of 2022. 

“We have our sights set on the College Football Playoff. Who would’ve thought Texas State would be in the running?” Damphousse asked rhetorically. “But we have a better shot than a lot of the Power Four schools that are in conferences that they have no chance of winning. They’ll never elevate over the programs in front of them. Well, we can do that where we are. It’s a realistic shot, especially with the expansion.”

The Pac-12 ties are already paying dividends for Kinne on the recruiting trail. The Bobcats and Washington State are in a battle for the top-ranked 2027 class. Only Boise State signed a better 2026 class, per 247Sports. That cycle included the five highest-rated signees in Texas State history. 

Kinne has been attached to nearly every Power Four opening since beating Baylor in 2023 despite signing a seven-year extension with the Bobcats. He says he signed it because of the current alignment. And because of a quote he heard from Scott Frost when he returned to UCF after a failed tenure at Nebraska. Frost said that nobody tells you when you’re climbing the ladder of success to stop when you’re happy. 

“For me, that really hit home,” Kinne said. “I love it here. My family loves it here. This area, to me, is one of the coolest parts of the country. We have a river running through campus. We’re headed to the Pac-12. This is just the start of something and we’re about to reach new levels.”

Texas State is happy to be in the Pac-12. But the triumvirate of Damphousse, Coryell, and Kinne are not satisfied. They know that the perception of Texas State is at stake, and that there are plenty of people who still don’t believe they’re worthy to be in the Conference of Champions. 

“You don’t want to limp into anything,” Coryell said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for this university and this athletic department and we have something to prove to the other teams in this league. We don’t have the history that a lot of these teams have so there’s a point of pride there in making sure they know the conference made the right choice by adding us.”

Not everyone believes Texas State is ready for the Pac-12. The 2026 regular season win total projection for the Bobcats is set at an over/under of 5.5 across most major sportsbooks. Phil Steele picked them to finish fourth in the conference behind Boise State, Fresno State, and San Diego State. 

From the 10th floor of the administration building, Damphousse can see the stadiums that will be packed this fall when his Bobcats ascend to the Pac-12. He can see the river that defines the landscape. He can still see the potential he first observed in 2022, but he’s starting to see it realized. The challenge is different now, though. Texas State spent years as a sleeping giant. The job now is to keep that giant awake. 

“Getting there was a big story,” Damphousse said. “Being successful will be an even bigger one.”