In a press conference with the media on Thursday morning, Pac-10 Conference Commissioner Larry Scott laid out the future structure of the conference, as it expands to include Colorado and Utah beginning in the 2011-2012 academic year.

All decisions were made unanimously by the presidents and chancellors of the Pac-12’s member schools in meetings in San Francisco earlier this week.

“It was a thorough and rigorous process of analysis, study, debate and consensus-building regarding the structure of the new Pac-12 Conference,” Scott said.

While Scott outlined numerous changes, three issues were given special consideration—the splitting of the conference into divisions for football, the location of the new Pac-12 championship game in football and a new revenue-sharing model.

The divisional split, subject to months of intense speculation, was finally confirmed on Thursday as a north-south split. Stanford and California will be paired with the Oregon and Washington schools in the North Division, while USC, UCLA, the Arizona schools, Colorado and Utah will comprise the South Division. Each team will play nine conference games —five against every other team in its division, and four against teams from the opposite division.

However, Scott said that, despite being in different divisions, the annual rivalry games between the four California schools will continue. Stanford will play rivalry games with USC and UCLA, facing both teams on an annual basis in addition to Big Game against divisional foe Cal.

“Maintenance of the core rivalries in California is a part of the core culture of the conference,” said Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State and the chairman of the Pac-10 CEO group.

Stanford will also play two of the remaining four schools in the South Division on a rotating basis.

Aside from football, no other sport will have divisions. According to Scott, the conference chose to split into divisions for football because of an NCAA requirement that a conference of 12 or more schools has divisions (and round-robin scheduling within the divisions) in order to stage a championship game.

Scott also revealed that the Pac-12 championship game in football will be played at the home stadium of the divisional champion with the best record in the conference, not at a neutral site (the model followed by other major college football conferences). If both divisional champions have identical conference records, then a tiebreaker system will be used to determine the game’s location —however, beyond the use of head-to-head results as the primary determining factor, no system has yet been formulated.

Revenue-sharing has also undergone significant changes. The Pac-10 currently employs an appearance-based model for parceling out media revenue to member schools —the teams that appear on television most often get the greatest shares of revenue. Historically, this arrangement has favored the southern California schools.

However, starting in the 2012-2013 academic year, the conference will move to equal revenue sharing, the model employed by most other major conferences. All 12 schools will aggregate their media rights, starting with negotiations for a new television contract in 2012.

Scott did stipulate that USC and UCLA would receive an additional $2 million payout apiece if total conference revenues failed to exceed $170 million, in order to ensure that they “continue to see growth.” However, once new media contracts are negotiated, it’s unlikely that conference revenues will fall below this threshold, and it was likely only included to secure support from USC and UCLA for equal revenue sharing.

While significant changes were made to football scheduling, Scott announced more modest changes to men’s and women’s basketball, the conference’s other revenue-generating sports.

Teams will continue to play 18-game conference schedules. In previous years, each team played a home-and-home series against every other team in the conference, but this model will change starting in 2011. Each school will play a home-and-home against its traditional rival each year (so Stanford is guaranteed a home-and-home against Cal), additional home-and-home series against six teams and single games against the other four teams. The home-and-home series and single games will rotate from year to year.

Unlike the Pac-10’s football media contracts, its basketball contracts are locked in with Fox Sports over the next two years. The annual conference tournaments (both men’s and women’s) will be held in the Staples Center in Los Angeles in 2011 and 2012, and Scott said that decisions concerning changes to the basketball tournaments and regular season would be made in the future.

Scott also denied that the conference was still actively pursuing expansion opportunities. Over the summer, the Pac-10 seemed poised to expand to a 16-team “superconference,” but after its agreements with Texas and other schools in the Big 12 fell apart, Scott was forced to accept a more modest expansion, adding Colorado from the Big 12 and Utah from the Mountain West.

“We aimed to create a modern 12-team conference for the long term,” Scott said. “We are building not just a national, but a global brand.”