Six months ago, the Mountain West was riding high, set to send more than half of its men’s basketball teams to the NCAA tournament and outpacing the Big East, ACC and dying Pac-12 in the process.
Now, before the ball is even tipped again in a new season, the Mountain West is the latest basketball casualty in the football-driven realignment machine. Four of its schools (San Diego State, Boise State, Colorado State and Fresno State) are set to join Oregon State and Washington State in attempting to reconstitute the Pac-12. The moves would take place for the 2026–27 academic year, a necessary timeline for the current “Pac-2” as it works to get back to the eight-team threshold required to be considered an FBS conference by ’26.
The Mountain West as currently constituted has its flaws, particularly as a football conference. In the current revenue above all climate of college sports, it won’t be particularly hard to spin this decision as a necessary one for the departing MWC programs. Yahoo Sports’s Ross Dellenger reported late Wednesday night that Pac-12 officials have “presented a plan that features a new media rights agreement worth more than the MWC’s current or future television package”—a sentence that’s likely enough for longtime power conference hunters Boise State and San Diego State to ask, “where do I sign?”
But the current Mountain West had built itself into a fun and quite successful men’s basketball conference. It didn’t quite have the brand power to consider it the West Coast’s version of the Big East, but over the last three years, each has sent 14 total teams to the NCAA tournament. The league sported some of the best home environments in the sport: The Pit at New Mexico is legendary, and destinations like The Spectrum at Utah State and Viejas Arena at San Diego State aren’t far behind. San Jose State and Air Force have largely been anchored to the bottom of the standings and San Diego State has rarely moved from the top, but there’s been plenty of parity and tons of highly competitive games. A few NCAA tournament disappointments notwithstanding, you couldn’t really script a better (or more entertaining) league at the fringes of true high-major territory than what the Mountain West had become.
What the rest of this remade Pac-12 looks like is still to be determined. One imagines they’d swing at other leagues first before circling back to poach more of the Mountain West, but it’s certainly possible that’s the square the league ends on. Regardless, it seems inevitable the remaining slots in the new Pac-12 will be given to whichever programs can add the most value to its TV deal or more simply, whichever programs boost the football product. The end destination is a world where the best basketball programs out West are even more divided than before.
Washington State and Oregon State have long been college hoops also-rans. In the last 15 years, the schools have combined for three NCAA tournament appearances and seven 20-loss seasons. And life seems likely to only get harder for them basketball-wise as the belt tightens financially and the schools’ two relatively successful football teams fight to keep up in the arms race. Meanwhile, Fresno State was among the least-funded basketball programs in the Mountain West and is paying new coach Vance Walberg a paltry $600,000 annually. San Diego State, Boise State and Colorado State all have excellent coaches and good institutional support, but building teams consistently competing for at-large bids likely just got harder, not easier. That’s especially true if the new Pac-12 only becomes a Pac-8 or Pac-9, leaving more nonconference games to schedule in a world where it’s already incredibly difficult for teams of that level to find high-level games.
And for those left behind, the Mountain West likely targets teams from Conference USA or the FCS ranks to backfill, none of whom are likely at-large bid contenders in basketball. UNLV, Utah State, New Mexico and Nevada are all very good programs, but their margins for error just got even slimmer without the league’s March standard-bearer in San Diego State. It wouldn’t be surprising if the endgame for the Mountain West is a one-to-two-bid men’s basketball league.
The best-case scenario for West Coast college basketball? The Pac-12 ends up circling back to the Mountain West, adds a few more of the league’s more consistent programs and ends up settling as a basketball league not much worse than the Mountain West. UNLV for a presence in Las Vegas would seem a likely target. Maybe they even end up with Memphis, a big-time hoops program with a strong history. That’d still likely end in a few proud basketball programs being left behind in the realignment sweepstakes, but at least there’d be a strong West Coast-centric basketball league incoming. Consider this the least-bad option currently on the table.
The worst case? Prioritizing more football-hungry regions, the Pac-12 goes after the likes of UTSA and Tulane or other football-first schools in the south/southwestern U.S. The resulting conference features San Diego State and little else in terms of proven basketball production. All of a sudden, all of the top basketball programs in the western U.S. are scattered throughout different leagues: UCLA in the Big Ten, Arizona in the Big 12, San Diego State in the Pac-12, Gonzaga in the WCC, and the next tier (New Mexico, Saint Mary’s, UNLV, etc.) all one realignment phone call away from their worlds being flipped upside down again. Perhaps the Mountain West dies altogether, with the more marketable entities left fleeing for the American and those left homeless stuck in Conference USA. From a basketball perspective, there are few good options on the table.
I spent conference tournament week this past spring at the Mountain West tournament. The energy and basketball culture around that league was special. And even with the deck stacked against them, the conference had proven it could build what looked like a sustainably excellent basketball league capable of competing with the biggest programs in the sport for seats at the table.
To lose that for a league that will almost assuredly still be treated like second-class citizens in football? I guess we should all be used to it at this point … but it’s hard to believe we won’t look back in a decade and see more schools worse off because of this latest pigskin-driven cash-grab.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Will New Pac-12 Affect West Coast Men’s College Basketball?.
