History
The WAC expanded from 10 to 16 universities in 1996, absorbing three teams from the defunct Southwest Conference (SWC) (Rice, SMU, and TCU), adding two from the Big West (San Jose State and UNLV), and Tulsa from the Missouri Valley. After three football seasons, most of the pre-expansion members decided that the new WAC was over-sized, and departed to form the Mountain West Conference. The MW added a ninth team in 2005: TCU, also a former WAC and SWC member, which joined after four seasons in Conference USA.
See also: 2010–12 NCAA conference realignment: MWOn June 11, 2010, Boise State University agreed to join the conference as its tenth member. On June 17, 2010, Utah announced it would be leaving the Mountain West to join what would become the Pacific-12 Conference. On August 18, 2010, amidst rumors that Brigham Young was considering leaving the Mountain West to go independent in football and rejoin the Western Athletic Conference in all other sports, the Mountain West Conference officially extended invitations to California State University, Fresno and the University of Nevada, Reno. Fresno State and Nevada accepted and would become the tenth and eleventh members of the league. BYU announced on August 31, 2010 that it would leave the Mountain West Conference and go Independent in football and become a member of the West Coast Conference (WCC) in other sports starting in 2011. On November 29, 2010, Texas Christian University announced all athletic teams would move to the Big East Conference effective in 2012. (Less than a year later, on October 10, 2011, TCU announced it would not join the Big East but would join the Big 12 in 2012 instead.) On December 10, 2010, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa accepted a bid to become the 10th member of the conference for football only. These changes would leave the Mountain West Conference with 10 teams for the 2012 football season.
The MW champion has qualified for a BCS bowl four times since the BCS formula was tweaked to allow non-BCS conferences to play in BCS bowls if ranked in the top 12; however, all 4 teams that qualified are no longer with the conference.
On October 14, 2011, the Mountain West & Conference USA announced a plan for a football only alliance.
On February 13, 2012, the Mountain West & Conference USA (C-USA) announced that both conferences would be dissolving after the 2012-2013 season to reform into one conference with at least 15 members for all sports, and a 16th team, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as a football-only member. However, when the two conferences discussed their plans with the NCAA, they were told that due to NCAA rules, they would forfeit substantial revenues. Specifically, the new conference would receive only one automatic bid to NCAA championships; at least one of the former conferences would lose future revenue distributions from the NCAA men's basketball tournament; and at least one former conference would not be able to collect exit fees from any members that departed to join the new conference. As a result, the Mountain West and C-USA apparently backed away from a full merger. In late March of that year, the commissioners of both conferences stated that all 16 schools had entered into binding agreements to form a new "association", although the Mountain West and C-USA will now apparently remain separate legal entities.
On May 2, 2012, San Jose State and Utah State agreed to join the conference for the 2013-2014 academic year.
Read more about this topic: Mountain West Conference
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