Western Athletic Conference

The Western Athletic Conference (WAC) is an American collegiate athletic conference, which was formed on July 27, 1962, making it the sixth oldest of the 11 college athletic conferences currently participating in the NCAA's Division I FBS (formerly Division I-A). In football, the WAC is a non-automatic qualifier member of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) selection system. The WAC covers a broad expanse of the western United States, with member institutions located in California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington, plus the "non-western" states of Louisiana and Texas (traditionally associated with the South). Many long-standing members left to form the Mountain West Conference or to join Conference USA. Three additional former members have moved on to the Pacific-12 Conference. Due to various members leaving the WAC, the conference will drop football as a sponsored sport after the 2012-13 season, therefore becoming a non-football conference.

Current members
The following institutions are the ten full members of the WAC for the 2012–2013 academic year.

Pink denotes schools that will be departing on July 1, 2013. Yellow denotes a school that will be departing on July 1, 2014. Seven current members will leave the WAC on July 1, 2013:
 * Louisiana Tech and UTSA will join Conference USA.
 * San Jose State and Utah State will join the Mountain West Conference.
 * Texas–Arlington and Texas State will join the Sun Belt Conference.
 * Denver will join The Summit League.

One current member will leave the WAC on July 1, 2014:
 * Idaho will join the Big Sky Conference.

Future members
Six new members will join the WAC on July 1, 2013:

Affiliate members
The following eight schools field programs in the WAC for sports not sponsored by their primary conferences.


 * Dallas Baptist will join the Missouri Valley Conference for baseball as of the 2014 season (2013-14 academic year).
 * North Dakota will join the WAC conference for baseball for the 2014 season (2013-14 academic year).

Former members
The WAC has 19 former members.

Membership timeline
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‡ In football, BYU is currently competing and Idaho will compete as NCAA Division I FBS independent schools.

∗ In football, Hawai'i currently competes in the Mountain West Conference.

Formation
The WAC formed out of a series of talks between Brigham Young University athletic director Eddie Kimball and other university administrators from 1958 to 1961 to form a new athletic conference that would better fit the needs and situations of certain universities which were at the time members of the Border, Skyline, and Pacific Coast Conferences. Potential member universities who were represented at the meetings included BYU, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Arizona State, and Wyoming. While the three Washington and Oregon schools elected to stay in a revamped Pac-8 Conference that replaced the scandal-plagued PCC, the remaining six schools formed the WAC, forcing the disbandment of the Border and Skyline conferences. The charter members of the WAC were Arizona, Arizona State, BYU, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. New Mexico State and Utah State applied for charter membership and were turned down; they would eventually become WAC members 43 years later.

Success and first expansion
The conference proved to be an almost perfect fit for the six schools from both a competitive and financial standpoint. Arizona and Arizona State, in particular, experienced success in baseball with Arizona garnering the 1963 College World Series (CWS) runner-up trophy and ASU winning the CWS in 1965, 1967, and 1969. Colorado State and Texas-El Paso (UTEP), at that time just renamed from Texas Western College, joined in 1967 to bring membership up to eight.

With massive growth in the state of Arizona, the balance of WAC play in the 1970s became increasingly skewed in favor of the Arizona schools, who won or tied for all but two WAC football titles from 1969 onward. In the summer of 1978, the two schools left the WAC for the Pac-8, which became the Pac-10, and were replaced in the WAC by San Diego State and, one year later, Hawaii. The WAC further expanded by adding Air Force in the summer of 1980. A college football national championship won by Brigham Young in 1984 added to the WAC's reputation as the best of the so-called mid-major conferences. This nine-team line-up of the WAC defined the conference for nearly 15 years.

Second wave of expansion and turbulence
Fresno State expanded its athletic program in the early 1990s and was granted membership in 1992 as the nationwide trend against major college programs independent of conferences accelerated. The WAC merged with the High Country Athletic Conference, a parallel organization to the WAC for women's athletics, in 1990 to unify both men's and women's athletics under one administrative structure.

In 1996, the WAC expanded again, adding six schools to its ranks for a total of sixteen. Rice, TCU, and SMU joined the league from the Southwest Conference, which had disbanded. Big West Conference members San Jose State and UNLV were also admitted, as well as Tulsa from the Missouri Valley Conference. Also, two WAC members for men's sports at the time, Air Force and Hawaii, brought their women's sports into the WAC. With the expansion, the WAC was divided into two divisions.

To help in organizing schedules and travel for the farflung league, the members were divided into four quadrants of four teams each, as follows:

Quadrant one was always part of the Pacific Division, and quadrant four was always part of the Mountain Division. Quadrant two was part of the Pacific Division for 1996 and 1997 before switching to the Mountain Division in 1998, while the reverse was true for quadrant three. The scheduled fourth year of the alignment was abandoned after eight schools left to form the Mountain West Conference.

The division champions in football met from 1996 to 1998 in a championship game at Sam Boyd Stadium (also known as the Silver Bowl) in Henderson, Nevada.

Increasingly, this arrangement was not satisfactory to most of the older, pre-1990 members. Five members in particular (Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, Utah, and Wyoming) felt that WAC expansion had compromised the athletic and academic excellence of the membership. Additional concerns centered around finances, as the new league stretched from Hawaii to Oklahoma and travel costs became a concern. In 1999, those five schools, along with old line WAC schools New Mexico and San Diego State, as well as newcomer UNLV, split off and formed the new Mountain West Conference.

A USA Today article sums up why the league broke up. "With Hawaii and the Texas schools separated by about 3,900 miles and four time zones, travel costs were a tremendous burden for WAC teams. The costs, coupled with lagging revenue and a proposed realignment that would have separated rivals such as Colorado State and Air Force, created unrest among the eight defecting schools."

WAC in the 2000s
In 2000, the University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada) of the Big West conference joined as part of its plan to upgrade its athletic program.

TCU left for Conference USA in 2001 (it would later leave C-USA to become the ninth member of the Mountain West in 2005, and joined the Big 12 in 2012).

When the Big West announced that it would drop football after the 2000 season, four of its members (Boise State, Idaho, New Mexico State, and Utah State) wanted to continue their football programs. Boise State was invited to join the WAC and promptly departed the Big West, while New Mexico State and Idaho joined the Sun Belt Conference (NMSU as a full member, Idaho as a "football only" member) and Utah State operated as an independent D-IA program. At the same time, Louisiana Tech (LA Tech) ended its independent D-IA status and also accepted an invitation to join the WAC with Boise State.

In 2005, Conference USA sought new members to replenish its ranks after losing members to the Big East, which had lost members to the ACC. Four WAC schools, former SWC schools Rice and SMU, as well as Tulsa, and UTEP, joined Conference USA. In response, the WAC added Idaho, New Mexico State, and Utah State – all former Big West schools which left the conference in 2000 along with Boise State when that conference dropped football. The three new schools were all land grant universities, bringing the conference total to five (Nevada and Hawaii).

Membership changes and the elimination of football


The decade of the 2010s began with a series of conference realignment moves that would have trickle-down effects throughout Division I football, and profoundly change the membership of the WAC. Boise State decided to move to the Mountain West Conference (MWC) for the 2011-12 season, and to replace departing BYU, the MWC also recruited WAC members Fresno State and Nevada for 2012-13. WAC commissioner Karl Benson courted several schools to replace those leaving, including the University of Montana, which declined, as well as the University of Denver, University of Texas at San Antonio and Texas State University-San Marcos, which all accepted effective 2012-13.

However, the resulting eastward shift of the conference's geographic center led the University of Hawaii at Mānoa to reduce travel expenses by joining the California-based Big West Conference (which does not sponsor football) and becoming a football-only member of the MWC. Further invitations were then issued by the WAC to Seattle University and the University of Texas at Arlington. These changes meant that the WAC would have 10 members for 2012–13, and Benson announced that the WAC planned to add two additional football-playing members to begin play in 2013. A further boost came when Boise State decided to join the Big East in football, and return to the WAC in most other sports, as of the 2013–14 academic year. So by the end of 2011, the WAC seemed to have weathered the latest round of conference changes.

But from this seemingly strong position, early 2012 brought forth a series of moves that called the long-term viability of the conference into question. First Utah State and San Jose State accepted offers to join the MWC. Similar announcements followed, taking UTSA and Louisiana Tech to Conference USA, and Texas State and UT-Arlington to the Sun Belt Conference, all as of 2013-14. Boise State also canceled plans to rejoin the WAC, instead opting to place its non-football sports in the Big West Conference. These changes left the WAC's viability as a Division I football conference in doubt, so the two remaining programs, New Mexico State and Idaho, started planning to compete in future seasons as FBS Independents.

In order to rebuild, as well as forestall further defections, the conference was forced to add two schools -- Utah Valley University, CSU Bakersfield -- were invited in October 2012 to join the WAC in 2013-14 but this did not prevent two more members leaving. Idaho opted to return all of its non-football sports to the Big Sky Conference in 2014-15 while Denver took most of its athletic teams to The Summit League as of the 2013-14 season. The conference again reloaded by adding Grand Canyon University and Chicago State University, and extending an invitation to University of Texas-Pan American, which was accepted by approval of the UT System Board of Regents in mid-December. Then in February 2013 the WAC announced that University of Missouri–Kansas City would join in 2013 as well. These changes would put the membership of the conference in 2014 at eight members, of which only one, New Mexico State, had been a member of the conference just three years before. Due to the aforementioned departure of the majority of its football-playing members, the WAC will drop football as a sport after the 2012-13 season, thereby becoming a non-football conference.

Sports
The Western Athletic Conference currently sponsors championship competition in seven men's and eleven women's NCAA sanctioned sports. Eight schools are currently Associate members in three sports.


 * Note 1 = With the changes in membership, football will not be a sponsored sport after 2012.
 * Note 2 = Of the six schools competing in women's gymnastics, three are Associate members, and the three member schools are all departing to other conferences. It seems likely that this competition will move to the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) which has four competing women's gymnastics teams.
 * Note 3 = Men's soccer will become a sponsored sport; current member Seattle and future members Cal State-Bakersfield, Grand Canyon, and UMKC already compete in men's soccer, and future members Chicago State, Texas-Pan American, and Utah Valley are adding the sport for competition in the 2014 season.
 * Note 4 = Of the eight schools competing in women's swimming and diving, four are Associate members; of the full members only New Mexico State is remaining; of the five new members, only two compete in women's swimming and diving. If the Associates remain with the WAC, there will be seven schools to compete, otherwise this sport could move to the MPSF, which currently has eight teams competing.
 * Note 5 = Both New Mexico state and Seattle play men's and women's tennis as do three of the five new members; there remains some question of the continuance of these as WAC sponsored sports with only five teams.

Football
For the most recent season, see 2012 Western Athletic Conference football season

WAC champions

Bowl games

The lone WAC bowl game tie-in for the 2012–13 postseason was the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.

Bowl Championship Series

The WAC champion received an automatic berth in one of the five BCS bowl games if they were the highest ranked non-automatic qualifying conference champion and either of the following:
 * Ranked in the top 12 of the BCS Rankings.
 * Ranked in the top 16 of the BCS Rankings and its ranking was higher than that of an automatic qualifying conference champion.

By qualifying under the first criterion above, the 2006 Boise State football team landed a berth in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, and the 2007 Hawaii football team received a bid to play in the 2008 Sugar Bowl. In 2009 the Mountain West champion TCU received the automatic BCS bid by finishing higher than Boise State in the final BCS rankings; however, the Broncos received an at-large BCS bid to the 2010 Fiesta Bowl. In three BCS bowl games, the WAC boasted a record of two wins and one loss. In addition to those three teams that played in BCS bowls, four other WAC teams qualified for a BCS berth but were not selected for a bid, including TCU in 2000 and Boise State in 2004, 2008, and 2010.

Rivalries

Football rivalries involving WAC teams included:

Men's basketball
WAC tournament

Rivalries

Men's basketball rivalries involving WAC teams include:

Awards

Women's basketball
WAC tournament

Rivalries

Women's basketball rivalries involving WAC teams include:

Baseball
The WAC has claimed seven NCAA baseball national championships. The most recent WAC national champion is the 2008 Fresno State Bulldogs baseball team.

WAC tournament

Current WAC champions
Fall 2011

Winter 2012

Spring 2011

National championships
The following teams have won NCAA national championships while being a member of the WAC:


 * Arizona – baseball (1976)
 * Arizona State – baseball (1965, 1967, 1969, 1977)
 * BYU – men's track & field (shared the national title in 1970)
 * BYU – men's golf (1981)
 * BYU – women's cross country (1997)
 * Fresno State – softball (1998)
 * Fresno State – baseball (2008)
 * Rice – baseball (2003)
 * UTEP – NCAA Division I Men's Cross Country (1969, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1981)
 * UTEP – NCAA Division I Men's Indoor Track and Field (1974,1975,1976,1978,1980,1981,1982)
 * UTEP – NCAA Division I Men's Outdoor Track and Field (1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982)
 * UNLV – men's golf (1998)

The WAC has also produced one AP national champion in football:


 * BYU (1984)

The following teams won AIAW (and forerunner DGWS) women's national championships while their universities were members of the WAC:


 * Arizona State (13) – swimming (6), badminton (4), softball (2), golf (1)
 * Utah (3) – cross country (Div. II), gymnastics, skiing
 * UTEP (1) – indoor track and field

The following current WAC teams have won NCAA national championships:
 * Denver
 * Ice Hockey (1958, 1960, 1961, 1968, 1969, 2004, 2005)
 * Skiing (1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010)
 * Louisiana Tech – Women's basketball (1981, 1982, 1988)
 * Idaho – Boxing (1940, 1941, 1950)
 * San Jose State
 * Boxing (1958, 1959, 1960)
 * Men's cross country (1962, 1963)
 * Men's golf (1948)
 * Women's golf (1987, 1989, 1992)
 * Men's outdoor track and field (1969)

Facilities
Note: Future members highlighted in gray. Members leaving highlighted in pink.

Awards
Commissioner's Cup

The WAC awards its Commissioner's Cup to the school that performs the best in each of the conference's 19 men's and women's championships.

Joe Kearney Award

Named in honor of former WAC commissioner Dr. Joseph Kearney, the awards are given annually to the top male and female WAC athlete. The various WAC member institutions Athletics Directors select the male award winner, while the WAC member instituitions Senior Women's Administrators choose the female honoree.

Stan Bates Award

The award is named in honor of former WAC Commissioner Stan Bates and honors the WAC's top male and female scholar-athletes, recognizing the recipients’ athletic and academic accomplishments. In addition, the awards carry a $2,000 postgraduate scholarship.

WAC Sports Network
In 2010, the WAC initiated the WAC Sports Network to increase television exposure throughout the conference's media markets. Football and basketball games were produced and distributed throughout the year. The network lasted two seasons and has ceased to operate, but it could be brought back if Learfield Sports, which operated the network, gains additional broadcast rights among new WAC teams.

WAC.tv
WAC.tv is a subscription-based provider of live and on-demand online streaming video of WAC events.