Over the last few years, college athletics has gone through reconstructive surgery on its conferences.
And on Monday, another appointment was set up.
The Mountain West Conference and Conference USA agreed to join forces to form a new intercollegiate athletic association for the 2013-14 season.
This was a desperate attempt by both conferences to stay relevant and competitive in the ever-changing landscape of football’s Bowl Championship Series.
Unfortunately, this move, like the others of the past years, is at the expense of UNM’s basketball program.
Last year, the Mountain West lost two programs.
Utah packed its bags to join the Pac-12, one of the six football conferences that have an automatic qualifier into the BCS games at the end of the football season.
According to SportingNews.com, the big six conferences (ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC) shared $145.2 million of the $174 million that the BCS distributed to conferences from the 2010-11 bowl games. The remaining $28.8 million was given to the other conferences to share, including the MWC.
Money talks and the institutions listen.
Brigham Young’s football program went independent and signed an eight-year television partnership deal with ESPN, allowing the program to keep all its revenue, instead of sharing the money within its conference, à la Notre Dame.
As part of the money-making move, BYU moved its basketball program to the West Coast Conference.
In return, the MWC got Boise State this season and Fresno State and Nevada next season. Hawaii will join in football only.
What a deal.
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The Broncos are 1-7 in their debut in conference and although Nevada is 21-4 this season in the Western Athletic Conference, it lost its toughest games against UNLV and BYU this season and has beaten teams from the 12th-best conference in the country. Fresno State is near the bottom of the WAC.
With the departure of TCU to the Big 12, and San Diego State and possibly Boise State to the Big East next season, the MWC is left with UNM, UNLV, Wyoming, Air Force, Colorado State and the three WAC members.
The Big East also snatched Memphis, Southern Methodist, Houston and UCF away from Conference USA.
The merger of both Conference USA and the MWC may ultimately give the new conference an automatic bid to a BCS game in football, but the basketball talent will suffer.
The Lobos and UNLV will be the class of the newly formed association if it stays at the current 16-team format.
The only team to be ranked in the top 25 from the 12-team Conference USA in the last five years is Memphis, one of the teams leaving.
East Carolina, Marshall, UAB, UTEP, Rice, Tulane, Tulsa and Southern Mississippi are the leftovers from Conference USA to join the new association.
Of these teams, only Tulane has a .500 record in the NCAA tournament with a 3-3 record in three appearances, and only UTEP has made it to the final four, when it won the national championship in 1966.
But that was almost half a century ago.
UNLV, UNM, BYU and San Diego State were top-25 teams at one point in the Mountain West in the last half decade; one is gone and the other will be, too.
The change could give the Lobos an easier road to more conference championships, but will rob fans of classic rivalries UNM has created in the past decade.
In 2009, the UNM basketball team had one of its best seasons in school history, finishing the season with a 30-5 record and earning a No. 4 seed in the NCAA tournament. But one thing people overlook is how deep the MWC was that year.
Four of the nine teams in the MWC had at least 25 wins. UNM, Brigham Young, UNLV and San Diego State all earned a spot into the NCAA tournament. Utah, a team that often finds itself atop the conference standings, is in rebuilding mode.
While the shifting of conferences across the country may lead to a college football playoff and excite millions of sports fans, it robs New Mexicans of having an elite conference in the sport they most care about, basketball.
