The WAC Is No Place to Be, So It’s Time SDSU Considers Changing Conferences

I think it is about time someone broke it to San Diego State that the Western Athletic Conference is no place to be.

OK, break the news gently, maybe even sugarcoat it. But do it. Please.

Here is a university veritably lost in an ungodly conference that spreads from Laramie, Wyo., to El Paso, Tex., to Honolulu. I can think of very few alliances that are more widespread, and one of them is the United Nations. None of them are collegiate conferences.

There are no natural rivals for SDSU in this conference, nothing crosstown like USC-UCLA or cross-bay like Stanford-Cal or cross-stateline like Ohio State-Michigan. The Aztecs would have to forge rivalries across mountain ranges and deserts and oceans and prairies, a tough sell that’s never sold.

Meanwhile, SDSU would have the expense of traveling to those remote places, a particularly costly expenditure for a football team with so many athletes and so much equipment.

Isn’t it a folly for San Diego State to be in the same conference as Wyoming and Colorado State?

I know this was once considered to be a bold move upward. After all, the Aztecs were mired in the rather provincial Pacific Coast Athletic Assn., at the time a run-of-the-mill collection of what might have been called the little brothers of California intercollegiate athletics.

In the PCAA, San Diego State was the bully on the block. The Aztecs were to the PCAA what Brigham Young is to the WAC, a perennial champion in football and a perennial contender in basketball. I mention those sports, because they bring in the bucks.

Understandably, SDSU started thinking maybe it might bag bigger game. Whereas the adventurers of decades past looked west for territory to conquer, the Aztecs looked east. They would invade New Mexico and Utah and Texas and Colorado and Wyoming. The year was 1978.

Simultaneously, a little affair called the Holiday Bowl was put together in Mission Valley. This game would match the WAC champion against an at-large guest, and surely this would come to be SDSU’s private party. Weren’t the Aztecs 55-9-2 for their last six pre-WAC football seasons? Could anything from those mountain or desert outposts derail such a juggernaut?

We know by now that BYU has won every WAC football championship since SDSU joined the fraternity. In their first seven WAC years, the Aztecs have played only one game of consequence. In that 1979 debacle, on national television, BYU was a 63-14 winner.

That game was the turning point. That game inexorably ended the glory days.

Fans started to drift away. Who wanted to watch a 26-7 loss to Colorado State? Or a 28-10 loss to Hawaii? Or a 38-7 loss to Air Force?

Football attendance has become more and more dismal, and the athletic program has plunged more than a half-million dollars in debt. In terms of finances, football is the straw that stirs the drink--or spills it. This one is all over the carpet.

Meanwhile, the academic side of the university bemoans the fact the president uses discretionary funds in what the profs consider to be an indiscreet manner. He bails out the jocks.

What is the cure for the evils that lurk on Montezuma Mesa? Winning? Maybe. Maybe even probably.

However, a more sensible geographic alignment would put the program on much more solid footing, making the good years more profitable and the bad years less lean.

Where to? I keep hearing that the Pacific 10 is such a logical step.

Indeed, admission to the Pac-10 would solve a lot of problems. Travel costs would be considerably less with four conference opponents in California and two others in Arizona. And USC would likely draw a bit better than Utah.

It would be wonderful, but you’re talking pie in the sky. The Pac-10 is not interested in solving SDSU’s problems. If and when the Pac-10 chooses to make any changes in its alignment, it will be looking for strength rather than weakness--and the Aztecs are not dealing from a position of strength.

Where else? How about back to the PCAA? Would it really be a step back?

I think not. Remember, those were the glory days for the Aztecs.

Do you know how many of the Aztecs’ top 10 home football crowds have come since they have joined the WAC? Two. One was last year’s game against UCLA and the other was for that 1979 “showdown” against BYU. The top 10 crowds include games against Pacific, UC Santa Barbara, Montana State and Fresno State, hardly the elite of collegiate football.

What’s more, the PCAA is a much better basketball conference than the WAC, perhaps the best in the western states. Would Fresno State, Nevada Las Vegas, Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach outdraw Air Force, Colorado State, Wyoming and Utah? You bet.

The sports other than football and basketball also would benefit from a decrease in expenses. It is proportionately more economical to take a track team or a tennis team or a baseball team to Long Beach or Fullerton than to New Mexico or Utah, to name two of the closest WAC brethren.

All of this probably makes too much sense to happen. It shouldn’t be a matter of anyone having to swallow pride and admit a mistake, because the people who perpetrated the move to the WAC are no longer involved with either the administration or athletics.

In the last few years, SDSU has changed coaches and changed athletic directors and even changed uniforms--and yet the struggle has continued.

I think it is time to consider changing conferences.