By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Wacky geography.
No, not a Jeopardy category.
Just one way of describing the strange world of college football teams and their conferences.
You know where I’m going with this — old Pac-12 standard-bearers USC and UCLA moving to the land of Big Corn of the Big Ten conference, setting up potential Big-10 football championship games like Maryland from the ACC, uh, I mean Big Ten, versus the UCLA Bruins of the Pac-12, uh, I mean Big Ten.
Buh-bye classic rivalries, geographic conferences and age-old traditions and hello big TV money.
The weirdness of college sports is that these strange conference bedfellows are nothing new, said Javan Hedlund, the Mountain West associate commissioner for external communications strategy.
UNLV, for example, was once a member of the 16-team Western Athletic Conference (WAC), which featured wacky, four-time-zone geographical matchups like Louisiana Tech vs Hawaii, reminisced Hedlund, who is in Las Vegas Wednesday and Thursday for Mountain West Conference Media Days.
Hedlund rolled out these numbers: Out of 131 FBS teams since 2011, 67 have changed conference affiliations.
“What will happen in college athletics? Nobody knows,” Hedlund said. “It’s all about TV revenue at this point.”
He argued that the loss of USC and UCLA in the Pac-12 and Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 for the powerful SEC helps the stature of the Mountain West.
“When you look at the Mountain West, we are very similar to the Pac-12 and Big 12,” Hedlund said.
And only a decade ago, college football programs from Hedlund’s Mountain West, including San Diego State and Boise State, flirted with moving to the Big East. And just last year, San Diego State, Colorado State, Air Force and Boise State looked at the American Athletic Conference (AAC) after three American Athletic colleges — UCF, Houston and Cincinnati — will shift to the Big 12 for 2023.
The Mountain West, which includes UNLV, was the creation from a split in the 16-college WAC in 1998 with eight universities going to the new Mountain West more than two decades ago. UNLV had joined the WAC in 1996 only to leave three years later.
The Mountain West’s first employee was none other than MW Commissioner Craig Thompson, who still is the commish of the 12-team Mountain West.
When the Mountain West started, Las Vegas was a college basketball town. Now this market is one of the hottest sports towns in the U.S.
The Mountain West knows this. It was the first college basketball conference to hold its annual tournament in Las Vegas and comes back year-after-year to stage football and basketball media days in Sin City.
This year even with the blockbuster news about USC and UCLA leaving the Pac-12, it’s a more stable year for the Mountain West.
“We try to keep it an even keel,” Thompson told LVSportsBiz.com Wednesday.
Thompson looked at the new conference affiliations like Los Angeles market teams UCLA and USC moving to the Midwest and observed, “We’re throwing away history, rivalries and traditions for extra dollars.”
The Mountain West likes Las Vegas a geographic hub for events, but the conference is not in the position to hold its football title game at Allegiant Stadium because the Pac-12 Conference already has its championship game in the stadium. Plus, there’s always a chance the Raiders will need to play a home there the same weekend.
So, the top Mountain West football team gets to host the conference championship game. There would be a weird situation if UNLV’s football team — by some miracle — ended up as the top-rated football team in the Mountain West and earned the home field for the conference title football game. It would be logistically impossible to convert the Allegiant Stadium field for the Pac-12 championship game, the Mountain West title game and a Raiders game during the same weekend. UNLV won two games last season.