One of the first recorded intercollegiate athletic conferences to form was called the “Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the Northwest.” It existed for two football seasons, disbanding after the 1893 football season was played. The four member schools for that league would come together with some other friends a few years later and form the conference now known as the Big Ten.
In June 1996, two conferences finished their final years in existence. Two months later, on August 31, 1996 a new league was born from the ashes of the Big Eight and the old Southwest Conference. It is known today (in an altered form) as the Big 12.
The Big Eight and the SWC were the last Division I conferences that ceased to exist. This week we are bystanders to the potential passing of another league.
The Western Athletic Conference may not be officially dead, but it is definitely on life support and is in critical condition at this time as a football league.
As of this writing, the league is set to lose almost all of its full members after the 2012-2013 academic year to Conference USA (Louisiana Tech, UT-San Antonio), the Mountain West (Utah State, San Jose State), or the Sun Belt Conference (Texas State, UT-Arlington).
The only teams without an invite at this time are New Mexico State and Idaho, and rumor has it that the Sun Belt is willing to add New Mexico State.If all of this comes to pass, it appears that Idaho will be
left out in the cold and the WAC, which was poached heavily last season by the Mountain West, will cease to exist.
The WAC has a legacy as a league known for offensive innovation, from the BYU Cougars air show in the 1980s (which gave birth to the Air Raid offense), to housing the Run-and Shoot offense in Hawai’i under June Jones, to the creation of the Pistol by Hall of Fame Coach Chris Ault at Nevada. It is not the only legacy for this league, though.
The WAC also made history off the field for being the first “superconference” in the 1996 by expanding to 16 teams, spanning almost 4,000 miles and four time zones. The league had teams in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California and Hawai’i. It would prove to be too much to sustain, and the league imploded.
The schism drove five of the founding institutions off to form the Mountain West Conference. But the WAC survived, in part because the Big West decided to stop sponsoring football. With this decision, and because of geography, the WAC was able to rebound from the split with the MWC by adding some of the Big West football schools.
But expansion dominoes dealing with the ACC’s raid of the Big East in 2004 and the Big East’s subsequent plundering of Conference USA led to a shuffling of the membership deck once again. The WAC survived again by taking on more Big West refugees, who had found homes in the Sun Belt conference in the interim.
Time, however, was not on the WAC’s side, and the money grab of conference expansion has finally caught up to the little league out west. The coup de grâce appears to have been delivered by the WAC’s former long-time commissioner Karl Benson, who left the WAC to become commissioner of the Sun
Belt just a month ago.
The man who, at this time last year was trying to keep the WAC together, may have ultimately put it out of its misery.
It seems like a fitting end for the life of this truly special conference.
