In a time of instability and uncertainty on the college sports landscape, the Pacific-12 and the Big Ten announced an innovative scheduling agreement Wednesday that links the two conferences and shows they have no imminent plans for change.

Starting in 2017, each team from the Pac-12 and the Big Ten will play a team from the other conference in football each season, and the conferences will also begin to play each other extensively in other sports starting as soon as next season.

The Big Ten commissioner, Jim Delany, said the essential idea was to create some of the benefits of conference expansion — greater reach, increased brand recognition and more quality games — without actually expanding. Delany called Larry Scott, the Pac-12 commissioner, about the idea in the summer, and the plan crystallized through a series of meetings between athletic directors and university presidents. The last meeting was in New York earlier this month. The two conferences have their own television networks and share more than a century of history tied to the Rose Bowl.

“To me, this is a creative and inventive approach through collaboration to achieve some of the same objectives that expansion can help you with,” Scott said. “It gives our conference more of a national platform, more play on the Big Ten Network and higher quality programming on our network without having to expand.”