Seems Familiar

Okay, so let me get this straight. Word came out this week that BYU is looking to follow Utah out of the MWC, become an independent in football ala Notre Dame, and rejoin the WAC in all non-football sports. This would make two conferences that BYU and Utah have deserted.

The classic WAC of my youth consisted of BYU, Utah, CSU, Air Force, Wyoming, New Mexico, UTEP, San Diego State, and Hawaii.

In the early-to-mid nineties, the WAC got caught up in the expansion craze and added three more west coast schools (Fresno State, San Jose State, and UNLV) as well as four southwestern schools (Rice, SMU, TCU, and Tulsa). After three years of this mega-conference, a few of the classic WAC schools got to thinking that a conference that stretched from Honolulu to Tulsa maybe wasn't such a great idea.

So the classic WAC schools ditched the schools that they had just invited to join, along with distant Hawaii, and conveniently replaced the El Paso school with the Las Vegas school, and formed a brand-new conference, the Mountain West, aka WAC 2.0.

The WAC 1.0 has evolved a little bit over the past decade or so. The five southwestern schools all eventually left the conference, and were replaced with more intermountain-y schools - Nevada, Idaho, Boise State, Utah State, and New Mexico State. Also Louisiana Tech joined, which made sense geographically when they had all the Texas schools, but doesn't anymore.

Meanwhile, the MWC stayed lean and mean for the first few years of membership, with the eight schools. Then in 2005, they decided to add TCU. I thought this was a little odd at the time, because didn't you guys just up and ditch TCU six years ago?

More recently, the MWC added Boise State ostensibly as a 10th member, but really it was to replace Utah, who left for the Pac-10 a couple of days later. And now comes news that the MWC has raided the WAC for Nevada and Fresno State, supposedly as additional members, but really to either replace BYU or persuade them to stay. Does any of this sound familiar? How long before we get word that Rice, SMU, and UTEP are joining the Mountain West as well?

So the reason the Mountain West came to be in the first place was that they wanted a more tidy geography, which was accomplished pretty well in a neat little triangle extending from San Diego to Laramie to Albuquerque.

But now the triangle has doubled in size - San Diego to Boise to Dallas.

And so now BYU might become the big brother in a conference that includes Louisiana Tech, New Mexico State, Utah State, San Jose State, Hawaii, and Idaho.

Definitely a step down in competition.

I think I might see where this is going. BYU does this Independent/WAC hybrid thing for awhile, realizes they still can't get in the BCS. So the presidents of BYU, CSU, Wyoming, Air Force, New Mexico, San Diego State, and maybe Utah State get together and decide to form a new conference that is more suited to their needs and feels more like how things were back in the WAC's heydey of the eighties. They'll probably call it the Mountain Athletic Conference or something.