Posted on: Friday, January 30, 2004

Buried by its own avalanche

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

There should be some embarrassed faces around the Western Athletic Conference today unless the Mountain West Conference announces it is throwing open its doors to wider membership by 2007.

The MWC has a press conference scheduled for this morning to announce the addition of Texas Christian as its ninth member and only expansion acquisition through 2005-06.

Whether the MWC will expand to 10 or 12 schools soon thereafter remains to be seen. But if it doesn't, there are a lot of WAC schools that shouldn't be too comfortable with the irony of the situation.

For in their haste to bolt the WAC for a more stable neighborhood, the schools that don't end up in the MWC will have only weakened the conference they are still resigned to calling home. Unless, of course, you call the addition of New Mexico State, Utah State and, possibly, Idaho home improvement.

Where there was an opportunity to strengthen and stabilize the WAC, they have succeeded only in undermining and weakening it.

Even before the MWC lifted its five-year moratorium on expansion last year, it has been like a back alley swap meet around the WAC with schools desperate to make their own realignment deals. While Hawai'i dreamed out loud of greener pastures in the MWC, Boise State, Fresno State, Nevada and Texas El-Paso put the full-court press on the MWC. And because the west was restless, the schools in the east — Rice, Southern Methodist, Tulsa and Louisiana Tech — panicked, too.

The eastern schools (except for Tech, which could still go any day now) jumped pell-mell to Conference USA, thinking TCU would be there to welcome them to visions of Southwest Conference lite. Instead, TCU only wanted to put more distance between them and C-USA, a conference on decline.

For a year now, WAC commissioner Karl Benson pushed a 12-school, two-division plan that not only would have made for saner, cheaper travel while significantly upgrading the WAC but also would have made the conference attractive to some C-USA schools.

We're told Benson could never get more than seven schools — reportedly all but SMU, UH and Nevada — to pledge the three-year allegiance needed to make it work.

So, unless the MWC agrees to take them on soon, UH, Boise State, Fresno State, Nevada and UTEP will have taken a significant step backward. Meanwhile, the eastern schools will have agreed to pay $1 million or more each to join precisely the same division they could have had by staying in the WAC.

Progress this isn't.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.