Manufactured Or Real Conference Instability?

[Pounder]

If I may refer you to memories of when 8 school presidents met in the Denver Airport and announced breaking away from the WAC to form the Mountain West Conference, please read between the lines of this little piece.

https://ravallirepublic.com/sports/college/big-sky-conference/article_4917f28e-c9e4-5aa0-a21d-c4fe23070e58.html

I'd be more concerned if higher-ups at Montana and Montana State were addressing this issue. Still, that's an interesting direction of conversation.

Of course, having said that, given there are Mountain West bloggers openly discussing finding ways to ixnay San Jose State and Hawaii from that conference, lest you assume I'm thinking of what happens here, may I remind you of a school a bit too similar (accounting for different levels) to San Jose in many ways... Sacramento State. I'm not sure the Montanas would actually want themselves rid of Portland State. Northern Colorado? Southern Utah? Northern Arizona, maybe?

Keep an eye out, in any event.

 

[bigskyconf]

Ah, but it is coming from Montana. Greg Rachac is a sportwriter from Billings (albeit not a very good one), and the story did originate from there. The main quotes do come from Choate and Hauck (or who I call, "Choke and Puke").

The Big Sky does have the most members in the FCS but the gap is not as big as before. The CAA now has 12 members, the Mo Valley and the Southland both have 11. The Mountain West can "blog" all they want, but I don't see SJSU and Hawaii moving down to the FCS any time soon. While Idaho did move down, one year is not a good sample size for other schools to see if it is successful. Also, Idaho had a strong history of success in I-AA, something San Jose and Hawaii do not have. You want Boise and Fresno, fine, but you have to keep the stragglers as well.

What I see eventually is the Big Sky retooling their footprint in the northwest. Montana, Montana, Idaho, Idaho State, Weber State, EWU and PSU in for all sports, and include NAU as sort of an outlier, but a school with a strong history in the Big Sky. Much of the football recruiting in the northwest (WA, OR, ID, MT) is at a FCS level so it makes sense for the Big Sky to cover as much of this area as possible.