WKU Hilltoppers: Conference Realignment Appears On The Horizon. Again. How Could It Be Similar & How It's Different Than Last Time

Once again, we're off to the races in conference realignment. What has to happen for the ripple effects to reach CUSA and WKU?

Jul 31, 2023

Don’t look now, but we appear to be on the precipitous of yet another round of conference realignment. Just as you were learning where everyone was again, too.

Last Wednesday, news broke that Colorado University was in discussions to leave the Pac-12 and re-join the Big 12, a conference it was previously a member of from 1947-2010. Less than 24 hours later, the move was made official. The Buffs are headed home, and we find ourselves in something of a familiar situation.

CU’s move feels like it’ll start the domino effect more akin to Texas and Oklahoma’s move to the SEC as opposed to the USC/UCLA move to the Big Ten (of which, granted, CU’s move is itself a reverberation of) - things are going to happen, and they’re going to happen fast.

With this being the third major round of realignment since July of 2021, let’s take a step back and take stock of what we can expect to be the same and what we can expect to be different, especially in how it may - or may not - impact Western Kentucky this time around.

Same: CUSA, If Touched, Will Be at the End of the Chain Reaction

Despite it coming just over a year from the initial announcement, make no mistake about it: Colorado’s departure from the Pac-12 to the Big 12 is an aftershock of the move by USC and UCLA from the Conference of Champions to the Big Ten.

As we currently sit, the Pac-12 is slated to start the 2024/25 athletic season with just nine institutions, a number that will almost assuredly get smaller before it grows again.

Assuming we see a similar chain-reaction this time around that we saw start in July of 2021, CUSA will not be unaffected. There’s no guarantee WKU will be the school that makes any sort of move, but I’d bet good money CUSA’s shapeshifting isn’t done ahead of next season.

Per Brett McMurphy, the Big 12 is interested in adding “between one and three schools” to join the league in 2024 along with the Buffs, with a priority placed on current Pac-12 members and, if none are interested, than moving to the ready-to-jump G5 members.

G5 candidates, according to McMurphy, include UConn, Memphis, San Diego State and UNLV, with SMU also a possibility, though slim because of the conference’s strong Texas footprint.

You could also lump that same G5 group, minus UConn and Memphis, as programs thought to be looked at by the Pac-12 as the conference races for survival. In my unprofessional estimation, if the Pac-12 only loses one more program to the Big 12 and is able to get one of the higher-profile G5 candidates (SDSU, primarily), there’s a fighting chance for a future.

If a majority of the “one and three” schools leaving for the Big 12 come from the Pac-12, not only will the conference most likely be put on life support, but any reverberating realignment would most likely take the form of “leftover” institutions (Washington, Oregon, Utah, etc.) be scooped up by a power conference as we inch closer to super conferences (don’t forget, USC and UCLA would probably love to have a couple more west coast universities in their little Big Ten island…), keeping CUSA - and by extension WKU - very limited, if not completely untouched at all.

Different: We Don’t Know Who is Joining the Buffs

As we just talked about, this round of realignment has started in a much, much different way than the previous two. As opposed to Colorado announcing they were leaving in tandem with another - like Texas and Oklahoma & USC and UCLA - they announced solo, meaning not only could any number of feasible candidates be next, but that the Big 12 isn’t set on just bringing in two.

Arizona seems to be one of, if not the, favorite to be moving buddies with CU and even if they do, there could be more dominoes to follow.

Every G5 school that is added - either by the Big 12 or Pac-12 - only deepens the chances that CUSA and WKU are impacted somehow by re-alignment. If Memphis joins their cadre of former AAC members, I can think of a school in the same general region who might could be a fit (depending said school’s administration has, and is willing to have, its ducks in a row).

If the Pac-12 can weather the storm enough to be in a position to add, and invite SDSU, UNLV and SMU, the MWC and AAC, respectively, may find themselves looking at CUSA to backfill. I can think of a southwestern institution or two who might find more in common with what the MWC has to offer than what CUSA currently does.

We can’t fully play out the full scope of potential dominoes because we don’t know where that second team is going to come from, which will make the next several months a two-folded rat race.

Same: Rumors of Conference Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated

To quote Michael Scott, “Oh, how the turn tables.”

Think back to July of 2021: In the immediate aftermath of Texas/Oklahoma’s shock announcements, all of the collegiate expert talking heads went straight to putting the Big 12 on its death bed, giving the conference next to no chance of survival.

What has happened in that time span? A college football playoff run, an NCAA basketball title, the addition of now five schools and a league that is starting to set itself up to be the No. 3 conference in the country, in terms of prestige (even if it’s more of a #vibes thing than actual reality).

It’s akin to where WKU and Conference USA found itself in 2021, as the conference lost three schools to the Sun Belt and six more were announced to be headed to the American. CUSA had no chance of surviving and, it looked like, was going to be left to three active members (thanks again for that one, MTSU).

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to argue that CUSA is in near the place or having near the revival the Big 12 is, even at a mid-major level. However, regardless of your level of happiness or excitement about WKU’s conference standing, you cannot argue CUSA doesn’t feel more stable now than it did in October or even November of 2021.

It’s the first step of that process - where the future of the conference feels uncertain, if there’s one at all - that the Pac-12 finds itself now. You’re going to hear a lot about if there’ll even be a Pac-12 in three to five years. Just remember that’s exactly what we were saying about the Big 12 (and CUSA) a couple of years ago, too.

Different: Pac-12 Feels Lifeless

Remember that optimism I just gave the Pac-12 at the end of the last section?

Yeah, scratch that. Because, for some reason, this feels…different.

In the case of the Big 12 and CUSA, they were relatively quick to weather the storm, with the announcements of future members to re-fill and re-shape the conference for the future.

The two conferences also had strong (to varying degrees) media rights deals in the works and very few, if any, reported hiccups in any of the reporting processes of their respective deals.

By comparison, the Pac 12 has neither of those things. It’s been over a year since the USC/UCLA announcement and the closest thing the Pac-12 has come to adding a replacement was when San Diego State just assumed an invitation would come and told the MWC “we out” before trying to walk back that they were actually out. If not for Colorado’s departure, that would still be the most bizarre story of the summer.

Not only that, but they have neither of those two things with the impending departure of at least one, if not more, conference members and a conference commissioner who keeps telling us that a strong media deal is coming but also oversaw the negations that saw ESPN bolt as a primary media rights holder and are still trying to come to terms with a conference that feels less and less valuable and viable by the day.

This is all very fresh, and the demises of the Big 12 and CUSA felt inevitable in the immediate aftermaths of those moves too, so things could calm down in a couple of months, but for now, it not only feels bad for the Pac-12, it feels worse in a way that it didn’t for conferences in similar positions a couple of years ago.

As we’ve discussed, there’s still a lot to happen so for a conference like CUSA and a school like WKU, the waiting game will be long, as they’ll be one of the last institutions to get touched in all of this. But it’s certainly the talk, and will most assuredly continue to be the talk, of the college sporting world until we start to get some more clear answers one way or the other.