The underlying thinking of San Diego State leaving the Mountain West for the Pac-Something Conference is debatable but clear.
If you can leave the dusty world of milquetoast media rights deals, side-eye glances when NCAA Tournament bids are doled out and winter trips to Laramie, Wyo., you do it.
You don’t walk. You run.
You live with all the uncertainty and questions about the reconstituted Pac-Something, the roll of the dice on its TV deals, the hand-wringing about future and the long-term play financially. You choose possibility because you’ve been there and done that in the sleepy Mountain West.
There are piles of questions about what you gain in a place that has Pac-12 also-rans Oregon State, Washington State and three other teams from the conference you already play in. Those are fair and completely legitimate.
Still.
Don’t think that San Diego State, Boise State, Colorado State and Fresno State have not penciled out the finances and weighed what a future with this group could look like versus what already is known about living in a shaky home on unstable ground.
“We feel like we’re in a great place to be financially better than where we would have been, even with the exit fee,” SDSU Athletic Direction J.D. Wicker said Thursday, after the Aztecs announced they would play in a new conference starting in the 2026-27 academic year. “There’s some risk in everything you do. We all accepted some risk when we got out of bed this morning.
“It is definitely worth what we’re going to get in this in the long term.”
The Mountain West was always going to be poached and there are fewer and fewer college lifeboats remaining. Is the one you just crawled into sea-worthy? We’ll find out.
To think, though, that the four universities kicking sand in the face of the Mountain West have not done math galore on what 10 years from now looks like would constitute incompetence of the highest order.
If you want to bash San Diego State for not jumping into the Big 12 when it had a chance, even at a partial share, fire away. This, though — even with questions outnumbering answers by a wide margin — offers a more logical West Coast footprint for travel.
Do you really want to send teams to Central Florida or Morgantown, W. Va.?
Even if the expansion that the Pac-Something needs to happen to get to an NCAA-mandated eight teams includes someone like Memphis, for example, you’re still avoiding the Eastern Time Zone and building a regional core in your backyard. Chasing down UNLV would make loads of sense, too.
And the Pac-12 Networks, its infrastructure and carriage potential, is not nothing. Wicker said they have been told they could air 2,000 events, but the new group would only need half of that.
All of a sudden, all your teams have a spot in front of the cameras. Though distribution questions hounded the network at times, the bones are there.
That is miles better than the Mountain West, which is only a few years removed from Aztecs’ football games appearing on glitchy online streaming services.
Low-rent stuff.
“Something that kind of gets lost with people, the Pac-12 enterprise, the network, is a massive asset that’s sitting there that was, quite frankly, a big reason why we considered this,” Wicker said. “… One, what you can do on campus with that, but two, revenue streams it can potentially generate down the road.
“So we look at this as, you know, that next step forward. It may not be the step that we looked at last year (before the old Pac-12 imploded), but this is definitely a step forward.”
Roll your eyes, if you must. You could be right. That requires you, though, to prefer the status quo in the Mountain West. That requires an even higher level of pretzeled logic.
Aztecs basketball coach Brian Dutcher also has to love the scheduling potential. Instead of a slate loaded with Mountain West games, there will be the flexibility to schedule marquee non-conference games that fatten NCAA Tournament resumes.
And as you try to establish traction in football, would fans rather see Washington State and Oregon State than New Mexico and Wyoming? You have to win first, but it’s a no-brainer.
Are the Aztecs running away from something as much as they’re running toward something? That’s part of the equation, without a doubt.
This is not the Pac-12 the university has coveted for so long. There’s no Oregon or USC. It’s rooted, for now, in Corvallis, Ore., and Pullman, Wash. Shrug away.
It’s true, too, that this seems a bit like being allowed to the country club, but it only resembles the club you salivated over in the sense there are holes and a fence. This is not Augusta National. It’s closer to Bushwood.
For now.
“You can’t look at this as a short-term type of discussion,” said Wicker, who said Discovery and The CW are potential partners as CBS and Fox deals with the Mountain West are nearing an end. “… This is a long-term move.”
You’re banking on potential while also saying you lost faith in the future of the Mountain West. It’s an indictment of one and a leap of faith on the other.
“We had very good data available to us about best- and worst-case scenarios,” SDSU President Adela de la Torre said. “We did our due diligence.”
Goodbye, Mountain West. Finally.
