Current PAC 10 schedules feature a round robin format with each team playing all 9 opponents each year. With two more teams this will not be possible. Most conferences employ an 8 game schedules to balance home and away games.
Most 12 team conferences divide along geographic lines. Indeed a North South division structure is the standard model of an expanded PAC 10. The ACC developed a rivalry based division structure with each team having a crossover to optimize the preservation of its large number of rivalries. This was a unique situation for the ACC and does not fit the PAC 10, as the rivalry structure is much simpler in the PAC 10.
I believe the PAC 10 would not need to form divisions at all. Each rivalry pair would rotate home-away games. All other teams can be arranged so that each team hosts every other team once every four years. This creates a four year cycle and uses 6 games per year, 3 home and 3 away. The remaining games can be generated after the season ends to match teams by the previous year’s results to create more competitive matches.
A seventh game could be added to the cycle to allow pairs of rivalry pairs to compete every year. For example the California schools could play every year, while the Oregon schools play the Washington schools and the Arizona schools could play, say, the Utah schools. Every year each team plays the three teams in there group plus two teams each from the other groups over a four year cycle.
One could think of this idea as allowing the groups of rivalry pairs to act like 3 divisions. Every year, each team would play one team from every rivalry pair on a four year cycle. Home and away would alternate every year while the team played would rotate every two years. If Oregon State is hosting UCLA then USC is hosting Oregon that year. This is the most symmetric implementation of the four year cycle.
It would be desirable to have the extra home game be out of sync with the rivalry game; if USC hosts UCLA one year then UCLA has 4 conference home games while USC only has 3. If you are short a home game, you get it when it counts most.
If the current 9 game schedule is retained, this leaves two conference games available for scheduling. These can be used to increase the competitiveness of conference games by matching teams with a similar performance in the previous year. By arranging the teams by conference wins the previous year, one can choose the pairings that minimize the total difference in wins between teams. Let the contenders play the contenders and the bottom dwellers play the bottom dwellers. These games could be used to guarantee that no team has more than one team on their schedule they did not play the year before.
One could question how to rank the new teams the first year of expansion. Laplace observed that the best approximation for determining the probability of an unfair coin given a limited number of trials is given by (W+1)/(N+2). The current PAC 10 teams would have played 9 games. Multiplying this estimate by 11 and subtracting one regenerates the original number of wins. If only games versus PAC 10 teams are considered, a fair comparison of the new team to PAC 10 wins would be (W+1)/(N+2)*11-1. A team that went 2-0 vs. the PAC 10 the year before expansion would have the equivalent of 7.25 PAC 10 wins. 1-0 would get be equivalent to 6.333 wins. Even would be 4.5 wins.
Disadvantages to this plan include the likelihood that the championship is a rematch from earlier in the season is 9/11 instead of 2/3 for a Division structure, assuning a 9 game season. This could even include rematches in back to back weeks if two rivals dominate the league (1/11 probability.) A division structure allows each team to be more familiar with their opponents as they see the same teams every year.
Advantages of this arrangement are that all arrangements of teams are possible in the championship. Situations where one division dominates another, such as the Big 12 of late, are avoided. Each team would get to see other teams on a fairly even basis, with more games against teams with a similar strength. Specifically, all teams get an equal number of guaranteed games in southern California, except obvoiusly the Califorina schools.
I might have gone into a bit much detail, especially for someone completely on the outside of the issue. Indeed few are likely to get to this paragraph. My main point is if I can sketch a reasonable outline of how a schedule could work certainly the powers that be can find something that works. If they want to hire me as a consultant to implement the above ideas … well we can all dream can’t we?
TrojanWire 
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