The Last College Football Superconference
30 years ago, the Western Athletic Conference decided to get real big, real fast, to try and save its television fortunes
As a thank you to everyone who has signed up for Assigned so far, I wanted to put together a little piece of bonus content. You still have a week to join as a paid supporter and vote on the first recurring column I’ll be working on!
At some point during the 2024 college football season, I’m going to look at the standings and be struck by a thought: Damn, there are SO MANY teams in the ACC/Big 12/SEC/Big Ten. I will then remind myself of two things. First, college football always changes in unexpected ways that eventually feel normal, or at least close enough. Second, the sport doesn’t really do anything entirely new, not even by straining conference membership numbers like this. And I will then recall the 1996 to 1998 iteration of the Western Athletic Conference.
The WAC of the early 1990s had a TV problem. The conference was part of a larger negotiating collective called the College Football Association, which included the SEC, the Big Eight (soon to be 12), the Big East, the ACC, the Southwest Conference, and several independents. But the CFA was splintering, with conferences exiting to negotiate their own deals, and the WAC exited the 1994 football season without a TV deal in place beyond the next year of play.
So the 10-team conference expanded substantially, offering spots to six new members that offseason. Southwest Conference left-behinds Rice, SMU, and TCU all accepted their invitations, giving the WAC a foothold in Texas beyond their sole existing college in the state, UTEP. The other three bids went to San Jose State, UNLV, and Tulsa. The WAC map pushed a bit farther East with Tulsa and the new Texas schools, but considering Cincinnati and Louisville had rumoredly been considered, it could have been much more of a stretch for a conference that already had Hawaii as a member.
If you’re looking for early signs that expansion proved tricky, just look at the rollout. BYU President Rex Lee issued a press release on a Tuesday saying he and his WAC counterparts had decided to add these six teams to the conference. That night, Lee retracted the statement and said it was premature. UTEP’s president, Diana Natalcio, said that expansion had been tabled, and athletic directors from SMU and Texas Christian said they hadn’t heard anything at all. It took until that Thursday for the WAC to formally announce the expansion.
My favorite of those reactions was from TCU Athletic Director Frank Windegger, who told reporters “This is the damndest thing. I don’t understand the protocol.” It’s the kind of thing you’d say if you were Tommy Lee Jones trying to play Minecraft.
The early expansion process also pissed off existing members, at least conceptually. One proposed East/West split of the WAC had UTEP and New Mexico in separate divisions, even though the teams had played every season since 1955 and were each other’s closest opponent in the conference. A North/South division fell apart because the conference couldn’t decide what to do with UNLV and Tulsa.
I’m the kind of person who enjoys proposing an overly complicated solution to a problem that could be solved relatively simply, so I appreciate what the WAC did to distribute its programs: four quadrants of four teams, with two divisions made up of two quadrants. Today’s superconferences have abandoned divisions entirely, so there can be no complaining about one division being stronger or one requiring lengthier travel. Teams get their schedules, grouse about them as individual fanbases, and no broad restructuring is discussed.
The WAC quadrants, on the other hand, were confusing, unbalanced, and the subject of incredible amounts of friction. You could not give a sports columnist a juicier fastball in the offseason than this.
But the WAC didn’t expand to test alternative scheduling formats. The conference wanted to salvage its TV fortunes. This is where things got complicated and somewhat speculative.
In the 1994 offseason, ABC and ESPN signed the WAC to a television contract through 1999. It had some improvements over the conference’s old deal, including more appearances on national broadcasts and an extra $1 million for the rights to a theoretical WAC Conference Championship Game. But all the money was based on a conference with 10 members, and the only part of the contract that shifted with expansion was the championship rights – since the WAC would need to expand to 12 teams to hold a conference championship game. The athletic directors were ready to add two teams, but the school presidents were the ones who pushed the number to 16, slicing up the TV pie into even thinner portions.
That made the WAC a gambler, sacrificing bigger shares for members in the short term in the hopes that a big (and hopefully successful) 16-team conference would be attractive to a television partner in 2000. Simultaneously, rumors swirled that the NCAA was preparing to break the top college football programs into four regional superconferences. If that happened, the WAC figured expanding to 16 would put it in the conversation.. This was the college sports version of the advice wildlife experts offer should you encounter a bear: Make yourself look as big as possible and don’t run away.
We’ll never know if the gamble would have worked because the Extra Large WAC didn’t stick together long enough to negotiate another TV deal. The financial pressures weren’t limited to sharing the revenue of a 10-team contract between 16 members. As part of the expansion, Hawaii was no longer required to pay travel subsidies to visiting conference opponents, which cost them around $218,000 a year in the 10-team WAC. Good for UH, but that added one more expense to anyone who played them on the road. The league was also very short on automatic bowl bids, with only two postseason games giving the conference a guaranteed slot. Wyoming went 10-2 in 1996 and only lost the WAC Championship to BYU in overtime, but they got left out of bowl season altogether.
In the 1998 men’s basketball tournament, Utah, one of the WAC’s founding members, made an incredible run to the title game, where they narrowly led Kentucky with five minutes to go before the Wildcats pulled away. Utah’s tournament run included wins over Arkansas, Arizona, and UNC. It should have been a moment of pride for the WAC, a sign of a promising future.
Two months later, in a secret meeting at Denver International Airport, Air Force, Wyoming, Colorado State, Utah, and BYU decided to leave the WAC behind. (How secret? WAC Conference Commissioner Karl Benson found out while recovering from emergency eye surgery). Most of them had been part of the conference at or near the beginning; of the defectors, Air Force was the newest member, and they’d joined in 1980. These five invited two legacy members (San Diego State and New Mexico) and one newcomer (UNLV), and thus the Mountain West Conference was formed.
On the way out, many of the key stakeholders of the WAC offered their perspectives on the failure of the superconference. Some, like Air Force, didn’t like being asked to sacrifice traditional rivalries to wrangle with the structure of such a big league, as the WAC had just voted on a two-division structure that would have separated the Falcons from Wyoming and CSU. Others emphasized the cost and effort of travel.
Benson put it plainly. “If you’re going to refer to the downfall of a 16-team WAC, there wasn’t enough revenue to keep 16 teams satisfied.”
You can see hints of these issues in the modern superconferences. The 16-team Big 12 decided not to protect every traditional rivalry, setting up years where Kansas State and Iowa State won’t play Farmageddon and Baylor and Texas Tech don’t clash in the BUTT Bowl.
Clemson and Florida State are already suing the ACC because they’re unhappy with the conference revenue model. SMU has to play a road game against Stanford and then another against Duke in consecutive weeks, and lord only knows what the basketball schedules wind up looking like.
But I’m most interested in how the 16-team WAC broke apart. The most powerful legacy members, who found the accumulation of smaller fish to be inconvenient, took their ball and started a new entity. I don’t think money or travel or scheduling will ever crack the SEC or Big Ten. A power imbalance where the haves get sick of the have-nots? I guess we’ll have to see.