WAC Was First Super-Conference

The year 2011 may go down in history as the year that set in motion the dawn of the Age of the Super-Conference in NCAA athletics. Texas A&M is leaving the mighty Big 12 Conference for residency in the Southeastern Conference, which will now number 13 schools, with 14 or 16 on the horizon. The Atlantic Coast Conference has just raided the Big East, taking away two of its gems, Pittsburgh and Syracuse, and moving to 14 institutions. Last year, the PAC-10 Conference tried to become the PAC-16 by adding teams from the Big 12, which had just lost Nebraska to the expanding Big 10. Failing, it added only Colorado from the Big 12, then took on Utah from the Mountain West Conference, becoming the PAC-12. This year, those same teams that shunned the PAC-10 a year ago, Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State, came begging the PAC-12 for a new home. The move would have blown up the Big 12 in the same way the old South West Conference was blown up in 1996. The PAC-12 politely declined.

The Big East has already added Texas Christian from the Mountain West for next season. This prompted the MWC, which also lost BYU to independence and the aforementioned Utah, to raid the Western Athletic Conference, taking away Boise State, Nevada, Fresno State, and Hawaii (football only). The football conference has actually grown from nine teams to ten, even with the recent losses.

People are now wondering where this game of conference musical chairs will stop. The SEC may be on the verge of taking Missouri from the Big 12. The Big 12's major players (read: Texas and Oklahoma) have now vowed to keep the conference together. Their best chance of doing that might be to move back to 12 teams (the Big 12 is playing this year with 10 members, while the Big 10 is playing with 12 members). The Big 12 is said to be considering adding everyone from Boise State to BYU to Houston to Notre Dame. You heard correctly: Notre Dame! The Big East has an official application for membership from East Carolina, and may add service academies Army, Navy, and even Air Force. The depleted WAC is bringing up reinforcements like Northern Colorado and Texas-Arlington from the Football Championship Sub-division (the old Division 1-AA), just to stay afloat.

There seems to be a race to see which of the major conferences will be the first to expand all the way to 16 teams. Articles are being written, speculating on what the college football landscape might look like with five or six super-leagues of 16 teams, each. All of this is very interesting. But, the fact is, there has already been a super-conference. The idea was definitely ahead of its time - and it only lasted for three seasons - but it was the Western Athletic Conference that first made this bold move after the demise of the South West Conference in 1996.

The schools in the South West Conference had been playing football together for around 70 years, in one form or another, when the league expanded to nine teams in 1975 by adding the University of Houston. That was a move that made the SWC even stronger than it had been before, especially in basketball, where Houston has a top-tier program. The first blow, however, in the destruction of the conference came directly from the east. The SEC decided to add to a good thing in 1992, expanding from 10 to 12 schools by bringing in former ACC member South Carolina and taking Arkansas back from the SWC.

The old Big Eight Conference, seeing what the SEC had done (and noticing the mounds of cash that were being made in that league's nifty, new championship game), was not going to just sit idly by and be upstaged, and certainly not for long. Secret talks between university presidents were undertaken. Then, on February 25, 1994, came the blockbuster announcement: Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor would join with the schools of the Big Eight, becoming a new league, the Big 12, commencing with the 1996-97 academic and athletic school year.

While the new league and its new rivalries certainly excited the world of College Football as a whole, little consideration was given to the former SWC institutions that were left for dead: Houston, Rice, Texas Christian, and Southern Methodist. (SMU's football program receiving the NCAA's "death penalty" in 1987 for major recruiting violations, was another major blow to the conference.) It is quite ironic that Baylor University has made such a fuss, recently, about suing Texas A&M for its impending departure from the Big 12. Baylor is the same institution that turned its back on its former SWC brethren without so much as a damn in 1996, gladly accepting doormat status in the Big 12's southern division in exchange for the huge annual payouts that are earned by the league's Big Boys. The threatened dissolution of the Big 12 would have left Baylor face-to-face with membership in the Mountain West and its smaller distribution checks, and it was laughable to see the Bears, for a few tense weeks, sweating and whining like Pigs.

Looking back, it's really hard to understand why the Big Eight and SWC didn't just merge into a 16-team conference at that time. I guess they just didn't want to split the profits 16 ways. Oklahoma was not approving the move unless Texas was included, and Texas wasn't going anywhere without Texas A&M and Texas Tech as in-state rivals. Baylor only got an invite because the number of teams moving had to be an even number. Houston, coming from a major television market and being more competitive than Baylor in football and basketball, must have really ticked someone off (Texas), to be excluded from the mix. As it was, the previously-mentioned former SWC schools were left out in the cold. That was where the WAC came in.

The Western Athletic Conference was born in 1962 from a merger between former schools of the old Border and Skyline conferences. The six charter members were Arizona, Arizona State, Brigham Young, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Colorado State and Texas-El Paso (UTEP)were added in 1968. In 1978, the old PAC-8 Conference invited Arizona and Arizona State to join, thus becoming the PAC-10. That same year, San Diego State joined the WAC, followed in short order by Air Force (1979), and Hawaii (1980). The addition of Fresno State in 1992 brought the membership up to 10 schools.

With four schools now available that had been considered by the press and public to be "major" programs, and with the conference also wanting to also be considered Big League, the WAC made a bold move, indeed, inviting all four of the Big Eight castoffs to join the league in 1996. Houston declined, forming the new Conference USA with Tulane, Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Southern Mississippi. The WAC's invitation was accepted by Rice, TCU, and SMU, with Houston's spot going to a formerly independent program, Tulsa. Also moving up, from the old Big West Conference, were San Jose State and Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV).

The WAC's move to 16 teams was unpopular, mostly due to the long distances the schools had to conquer in order to play each other. The league footprint of the Super-WAC covered Honolulu to Houston and San Diego to Laramie, Wyoming. It was considered to be just too big and too awkward to be a success, and no one was really happy with it. The idea still might have worked, however, if the 16 athletic programs had at least all made it to "major" status. That just did not happen. Without Texas, Oklahoma, et al., the new WAC members who had been in the SWC were considered just additions to the also-rans. (Houston also did not escape, running into the same "small-time" status problem in its new league.) Early in 1999, eight of the stronger WAC institutions (seven of which had been in the nine-team WAC after 1980) seceded from the league, establishing the new Mountain West Conference.

UNLV was the only "new" member invited to join the Mountain West. Rice, Tulsa, UTEP, TCU, and SMU all eventually wound up in Conference USA, although TCU ultimately won MWC membership in 2005. The WAC, with Hawaii, Fresno State and San Jose State as anchor tenants, carried on, surviving by adding Nevada (2000); Boise State and Louisiana Tech (2001); and Utah State, New Mexico State, and Idaho (2005). With the upcoming departures of Hawaii and Fresno State, San Jose State will be left as the only school remaining of the eight schools that made up the WAC after the Mountain West split.

Conference USA is another league that changed, all the way to 12 teams, and at one time housed all of the former SWC schools that did not join the Big 12. Ironically, a new response by the Mountain West Conference and Conference USA to all of this change is the consideration of a football-only merger between them, with the champions of the leagues meeting for an overall championship and a hoped-for spot in college football's Bowl Championship Series.