If you wanted to spin a map of the United States like a pinwheel, you’d stick the page at Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of America. Drive east from Lebanon and you’ll see a quilt of amber and green farmland, punctuated by increasingly large and increasingly frequent cities as you move towards the Atlantic. Drive west and you’ll see mile after mile of brown ranchland, rock, and desert. As towns and toilets become rare, you grow mindful of two things — distance and scarcity, the defining features of life west of the hundredth meridian.
Few settled in the arid, infertile expanse between Lebanon and California. But some did settle. Because those settlers begat children, they chartered colleges. And because roughly half of those children were boys, those colleges played football. Soon after these western colleges began playing football, they banded together into athletic conferences, mimicking the schools back east. Those first conferences — the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, the Border Conference in the Southwest, the Skyline Conference further north — were largely ignored then, and they are mostly forgotten now. Many perished long ago; a few survive in Division II and Division III. You can write an adequate history of college football without spending a footnote on them.
These were marriages of convenience, not love. Western colleges were isolated both from each other and from the rest of the country. Neither interstate highways nor commercial air travel yet existed, so the railroads provided the only reliable means of traveling significant distances for competition. Schools nearby the same cluster of railways simply agreed to play one another regularly; thus the first western athletic conferences were formed.
Sometimes, even playing regularly was a challenge. The Border Conference — which encompassed schools in Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas — was split between two major rail lines. The Atkinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe connected the northern half of the conference, while the Union Pacific connected the southern half. Railway affiliations mattered just as much as conference affiliations. Arizona State and Texas Tech shared the Border Conference together for 25 seasons, yet did not play each other even once. Schools were shackled to the rails, and the links at one end of the chain seldom touched one another.
Distances did not change in the 1950s, but with the introduction of commercial air travel, the concept of “too far” did. Schools 1,000 miles apart were once separated by days on land — maybe weeks, if the terrain was bad. Now they were separated by only hours, regardless of whether mountain ranges or prairie divided the campuses.
Scarcity dwindled, too. When admitted in 1912 as the 48th and last of America’s contiguous states, Arizona was a wasteland. Only 10,000 or so people lived in Phoenix, the state’s capital, and only around 13,000 people lived in Tucson, then the state’s most populous city. Those numbers grew sluggishly over the first half of the twentieth century. Phoenix, with around 100,000 residents, by 1950 had passed Tucson as Arizona’s most populous city, but it was still only the 99th-largest city in the United States, between Corpus Christi, Texas and Allentown, Pennsylvania. By 1970, Phoenix, with nearly 600,000 residents, had jumped from 99th to 20th. Fewer than 50,000 people lived in Tucson in 1950, but by 1970, that number had swollen to over 250,000, or more people than had lived in the entire state of Arizona when it was admitted to the union six decades before.
Before, nearby college football coaches had needed to convince kids to move to Arizona (or Wyoming, or Utah, or New Mexico). Unsurprisingly, few coaches were able to do so, and the college football teams in the region suffered accordingly. More homegrown high school talent led to improved college teams in the region, since now those coaches merely had to convince local kids to stay home. After the population boom, a few colleges fielded mediocre or — sometimes — good teams. For the first time, western football was capable of inequality.
This was a bad time to fall behind in the college football rat race. Athletic scholarships, once a flashpoint of national controversy, had been approved by the NCAA. The money to pay for those scholarships had to come from somewhere. The vast majority of football revenue for came from ticket sales. But few fans paid money to watch bad teams. The worst programs were trapped in a vicious loop, where untalented teams led to disappointing game attendance, which sapped programs of the money they needed for scholarships, which prevented the schools from adding talent, which in turn led to still lower game attendance. Efforts to raise scholarship money from other sources met stubborn resistance; a University of Montana student referendum to raise tuition by five dollars per semester on behalf of the football team generated raucous debate across campus. The referendum eventually passed by fewer than 200 votes.
Montana’s futility hurt more than Montana. Every program that defeated Montana — and Northern Arizona State, and West Texas Teachers’ College, and so on — suffered through their association with these dregs. For the programs that were enjoying their first tastes of success, annual beatdowns of local patsies accomplished little.
Apart from the Pacific Coast Conference — grandfather of the Pac-12 — the best college football west of Lebanon, Kansas in 1961 was played in Logan, Utah. There, the Utah State Aggies, led by lineman Merlin Olsen, finished the regular season 9–0–1 and ranked #10 in the final AP poll. Still greater things were expected of Utah State in 1962; Sports Illustrated would rank the Aggies as the third-best team in the western United States in its season preview; USC was ranked fourth.
The Beehive State’s other two football teams were not faring as well. The University of Utah was mired in a decade-long stretch of mediocrity, winning eight games in a season only once in that stretch. Brigham Young University needed to improve quite a bit just to reach mediocrity; not once between 1933 and 1961 did the Cougar win seven games. The Aggies defeated both of their instate foes during Utah State’s dominant 1961 season — the first in a close contest, and the second in a blowout.
BYU and Utah were struggling, but Utah State was not the only solid team in the west. The University of Wyoming — the only team to blemish Utah State’s record during the 1961 regular season with a tie — had finished two of the past dozen seasons ranked in the AP poll. (Wyoming head coach Bob Devaney left for the University of Nebraska following the 1961 season; he would win two national championships in Lincoln over the next decade.) Arizona and Arizona State — whose rivalry stretched back to the days when Arizona was only a territory — were each ranked in the AP poll at various times over the previous five years. These schools would form the building blocks of the new, semi-elite conference.
Except Utah State, that is. BYU athletic director Eddie Kimball was instrumental in establishing the new conference, and in return, BYU gained admittance to a club in which it did not belong on the merits. Utah also joined the new conference, though this invitation was more defensible than BYU’s. But Utah State — which had just finished 1961 among the ten best teams in the nation, and which had won seven of its last ten games against BYU — was left outside. In Utah State’s place, the University of New Mexico — a program which had never, and still has never, been ranked in any AP poll, ever — was invited.
There was one defensible reason to exclude Utah State: The founders needed to construct the new conference not only for the present, but also for the future. Five of the six admitted schools were located in or near moderate-sized, growing cities — Tucson, Tempe/Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Albuquerque — and it was thought that the continuing emergence of those cities gave their nearby schools an advantage going forward. Sequestered in Logan — population 18,731 in 1960 — Utah State had no such advantage.
But there was also a pinch of class-ism mixed into the decision to exclude the Aggies. As the “Aggies” nickname betrays, Utah State was established as an agricultural college. Throughout the United States persisted tension — less pronounced than before, but nevertheless continuing — between state-chartered and land-grant colleges. Students at flagship schools often felt themselves to be the social betters of the hayseeds studying irrigation at Cow College A&M. For their part, the students at the States and A&Ms believed themselves to be a more industrious bunch then those spoiled scions of merchants and academics who couldn’t muster admission to the Ivy League. This antagonism transcended football, of course, and the prejudices were reflections of a cultural barrier that has existed — in America and elsewhere — since time immemorial. Neither side was right or wrong, or at least neither side was more right or more wrong than the other. Unfortunately for the Aggies though, the other side had more votes this time.
The name of the new conference evinced the lofty ambitions of its members. This was the Western Athletic Conference (“WAC”), or maybe the Western Athletic Conference. This dream of preeminence was not so far-fetched in 1962. The Pacific Coast Conference, once indisputably the top football conference in the western half of the country, had disbanded in 1959 amidst a slush-fund scandal. Oregon, Oregon State, and Washington State spent the next handful of seasons as independent programs, and there was hope among the WAC founders that at least one of those teams might soon end up in the fold. As long as those dreamers were dreaming, they could dream about UCLA or USC someday joining the WAC as well.
These fantasies were never fulfilled. By 1964, the three PCC castoffs had rejoined their former compatriots, creating the Pac-8 Conference in the process. The WAC settled a few years later for adding Colorado State and the University of Texas-El Paso instead. Utah State’s application was denied.
Although no one was paying attention, the WAC played some darn good football in those first years. The 1967 Wyoming Cowboys finished the regular season undefeated and ranked #6 in the AP poll, then led LSU in the fourth quarter of the Sugar Bowl before faltering. Arizona State defeated Wisconsin, in Madison, by 26 points that season. Arizona, which won only one WAC game that year, defeated Ohio State in Columbus. Even lowly BYU defeated Oregon State, which finished 1967 ranked #7 in the AP poll, by 18 points in Corvallis.
The WAC was the most under-respected conference in America at that time, and Arizona State was the most under-respected team in the WAC. The 1968 Sun Devils went 8–2 and outscored their opponents by over 25 points a game, yet finished the year unranked in the AP poll. When the University of Minnesota agreed to host Arizona State to open the 1969 season, a Twin Cities newspaper questioned why anyone would ever play a team from the lowly WAC. Arizona State defeated the Gophers by over three touchdowns. The Sun Devils finished 1970 undefeated, including wins over Pac-8 and Big Eight teams. But instead of receiving an invitation to a major postseason game, Arizona State fell to the middling Peach Bowl, which had been established just two years prior. It won that game 48–26 over North Carolina, which had finished with the best record in the ACC that year. The Sun Devils won five consecutive WAC championships from 1969–1973, including four outright championships, losing only two conference games during that stretch.
Arizona State’s success was both blessing and curse for the WAC. Because the Sun Devils towered over the rest of the conference, none of the other programs — some of which were quite good — received their proper due, since they were so obviously inferior to Arizona State. But because it towered so far over the rest of the conference, Arizona State’s success was also discounted, since the Sun Devils were “only” dominating WAC teams. Even worse for Arizona State, chances to defeat quality programs from other conferences evaporated, as teams began following the advice of the Minnesota newspaper and refused to schedule the Sun Devils.
Nor could Arizona State gain entry to the top bowl games, since those bowls reserved spots for teams from the major conferences. So the WAC created its own bowl game for its champion. Because the WAC champion was (correctly) assumed to be Arizona State for the foreseeable future, the bowl game was located in Tempe and titled the Fiesta Bowl. Arizona State won four of the first five Fiesta Bowls, with victories over Florida State, Missouri, Pittsburgh, and Nebraska. That final game capped a 12–0 season for the Sun Devils — the only major college football team in 1975 to finish undefeated. Nevertheless, Arizona State was ranked only #2 in the final AP poll, with Oklahoma claiming the top ranking despite previously losing to an unranked Kansas team by 20 in Norman.
Then they were gone. Arizona State’s success had been merely the prelude to its departure. The Pac-8 saw the run of success in Tempe and offered both Arizona State and Arizona a place in the soon-to-be Pac-10 in 1978. Neither school hesitated before accepting the offer.
By most measures, the WAC compared decently with the other major conferences. At least one or two of its teams were regularly ranked in the polls come season’s end each year. Most of its programs fared well when they played teams from other conferences. But when the time came to choose, the WAC’s vanguard schools departed without blinking. Fifteen years after its inception, the WAC was not an end to itself, but a way station through which schools would move along the road to their desired ultimate destination.
Yet the WAC regrouped. Three schools — San Diego State, Hawaii, and the Air Force Academy — were added between 1978 and 1980. (Utah State’s applications were denied.) These new schools were ostensibly replacements for Arizona State. But the next Arizona State was already a member.
LaVell Edwards was head coach at Salt Lake City’s Granite High School in 1962 when BYU offered him a position on its football staff. Edwards hadn’t been particularly successful as a high school coach; more of his teams had finished with losing records than winning ones. Nor was Edwards particularly innovative; his teams at Granite ran the single-wing offense, which by 1962 had already been out of fashion for over a decade. But BYU head coach Hal Mitchell was desperate to do something — anything — to turn the Cougars around, and he decided to resurrect the single-wing that his teams ran during his playing days. Not many Mormon football coaches well versed in the single-wing, so Edwards was offered the job.
The single-wing experiment failed, BYU fired Mitchell, and Edwards toiled in anonymity for the next decade. When the next BYU head coach, Tommy Hudspeth, resigned in 1971 after three losing seasons in four years, Edwards was promoted to take over the doormat program. Upon learning that the hitherto failure of a coach had been promoted, star wide receiver and Granite High School graduate Golden Richards, one of the few bright spots on the 1971 BYU team, transferred to Hawaii. Surely the single-wing-oriented Edwards would have little use for the passing game, thought Richards.
Football in the 1960s and 1970s was typified by the maxim attributed — depending upon what part of the county you are from — to either Texas’s Darrell Royal or Ohio State’s Woody Hayes: three things can happen when you throw the ball, and two of them are bad. In his previous eighteen years as a football coach at the high school and college level, Edwards had had enjoyed four winning seasons. And by now, the formerly single-wing oriented Edwards knew that there was only one thing that could happen if BYU ran the ball like everyone else, and that one thing — getting fired — was bad, too.
So BYU threw the ball — on any down, at any spot on the field, at any point during the game. And, for the first time in school history, BYU won. In 1972 — Edwards’s first season as head coach — BYU won seven games, a feat that the program had accomplished only twice before in its half-century history. Two years later, BYU won the WAC championship, unseating Arizona State from its throne. After a small slip backwards in 1975, BYU won the WAC championships each of the next ten seasons, including outright championships in the final eight of those years.
Edwards may not have known it, but several long-term trends were working in his favor. Scoring was dwindling at all levels of football. The NFL, looking to change that trend, liberalized its passing rules in 1978; the NCAA followed shortly thereafter. In college, the most significant of those changes occurred along the offensive line, where blockers were permitted far more latitude without being penalized for holding. Other coaches, wedded to the systems that had earned them success, remained on the ground. Edwards, who had risen to the top of the WAC through the air, found implementing his system easier than ever.
Off-the-field rules were also changing. When Edwards started at BYU, schools could give as many athletic scholarships as they wished. The top programs recruited as many as 50 freshmen each year, then hoarded that young talent on the bench and let the next three years of intrasquad competition sort the wheat from the chaff. With few good high school players falling to the lower programs, every season ended up looking pretty much the same as the season that had just passed. Alabama won eight SEC championships in the 1970s; USC won six Pac-8 and Pac-10 championships; Michigan and Ohio State won a share of every Big Ten championship over that decade.
To promote competitive balance, the NCAA restricted football teams to only 95 athletic scholarships in 1978. Top programs still had their choice of the best talent, but now, players who might have gone to Oklahoma or Texas and sat on the bench went elsewhere, if they wanted their tuition paid by their school. New teams climbed to the top of the pyramid: Miami, Georgia, Clemson, and Penn State each won their first national championships in the four-season stretch from 1979 to 1982. Some of that talent made its way to Provo for the first time.
BYU also benefited from an unprecedented stretch of talent at quarterback, the now-indispensable position for the pass-happy Cougars. Since 1959, the Sammy Baugh Trophy has been given to the nation’s top college quarterback each season. Seven Cougars won the award during Edwards’s tenure at BYU, including future NFL players Jim McMahon, Steve Young, and Ty Detmer (who also won the Heisman Trophy). No other school has produced more than four winners.
Those trends culminated for BYU in 1984. Steve Young had graduated the year prior, and many expected the Cougars to step backwards; Sports Illustrated spent only one sentence of its 1984 college football preview on the “rebuilding” BYU. Despite finishing four of the past five seasons in the top 20 of the AP poll, BYU began 1984 unranked.
But week after week, BYU kept winning. A win at #3 Pittsburgh in the first week of the season launched BYU to #13. Yet with few quality teams left on the schedule, it was thought that BYU would languish in the middle of the poll for the remainder of the season, as it had so many seasons before. For as long as there were other undefeated teams, BYU was ranked among the lowest of the flawless. But one by one, those undefeateds fell. Many voters nevertheless resisted ranking BYU “too” high. Oklahoma, Texas, and Nebraska were ranked in front of the Cougars in late October despite less-than-perfect records. Then each of those teams lost again. By November 20, with every team in the nation having lost one game (and almost every team having lost or tied more than one), most voters were out of excuses. BYU was #1 — the first time the AP poll had ever ranked a WAC team #1.
Suddenly, the cozy bowl system that had kept teams like BYU out of contention worked against the oligarchy. When Arizona State left the WAC, it took the Fiesta Bowl with it. In turn, the WAC established the Holiday Bowl for its champion. Shut out from the major bowls, the WAC champion — always BYU — play a middling team from a power conference in that game. This worked perfectly for the big schools; BYU was isolated in San Diego, where the Cougars couldn’t act as an obstacle for the schools competing for the national championship in the final week. But in 1984, a major bowl appearance for BYU would have meant one final opportunity for someone else to unseat the Cougars. Instead, BYU headed back to San Diego and played the same type of mediocre team it always played in the Holiday Bowl, while the big boys went to their Rose and Sugar and Orange Bowls.
For a substantial portion of the college football world, BYU’s ascension was a disgrace. The New York Times unveiled a computer program designed to “scientifically” rank the nation’s football teams; the computer program ranked BYU tenth. Many AP voters swore that they would not vote BYU #1 unless every other team in the country lost two or more games. It was no matter. Every other team had too many flaws, starting with their records. BYU had done what had been asked of previous champions: it had defeated every team that was placed in front of it. This was enough for most — though certainly not all — AP voters. LaVell Edwards and the lowliest program from the lowly WAC had climbed the greasy pole to the top of the college football world.
With its first national championship, the WAC seemed healthier than ever. But the conference had just taken ill. And although the disease lay dormant for years, it eventually proved fatal.
Before 1984, the NCAA monopolized the college football television market. Television networks purchased the entire bundle of college football games from the NCAA, which then restricted how many of those games the networks could show. Conferences then received money from the NCAA based (roughly) upon how many times their teams appeared on television. Because the networks could broadcast only a few games each week, the contests they chose had to appeal to as many viewers nationally as possible. To earn as much money as possible for themselves, conferences needed powerful, nationally relevant teams whose games could appeal to the whole country.
The major football programs hated this system, because the NCAA restricted how many times each school could appear on television. Led by the Universities of Oklahoma and Georgia, these programs sued the NCAA in 1981, alleging that the television policy violated federal antitrust laws. After three years of litigation, the Supreme Court agreed. In June 1984, the highest court in the nation declared the NCAA television policy illegal. Teams and conferences could now sell as many football games as they wished to the television networks, and the networks could show as many games each Saturday as they liked.
Conferences still wanted powerful programs, of course; fans prefer watching good teams to bad ones. But population size and local popularity mattered more than ever before. Suppose, for example, that the most popular match nationally on a certain week is Texas vs. Oklahoma. If a television network could choose only one game, it would choose that one. Nevertheless, there are particular markets in which other games would be more popular with the local population. Fans in the South might prefer to watch Georgia vs. Auburn; those along the Pacific coast might prefer USC vs. Washington. Television networks would rather show five different games to twenty million viewers than one game to ten million viewers, even if each of the five games earns just four million viewers apiece. All this was bad news for the WAC, whose territory included more rattlesnakes than people — even with the defection of the Arizona schools — and whose best hope of appearing on television was to have a team such as BYU matter nationally.
This change spurred the conferences to add new schools — and new television markets — to their memberships. First, the Big Ten captured the formerly independent Penn State. Then the SEC added South Carolina and seduced Arkansas away from the Southwest Conference. Weakened from Arkansas’s departure and from now being located entirely within only Texas (and thus capturing only one state’s television markets), the Southwest Conference merged with the Big Eight to create the Big 12.
Many assumed that these moves were only the first steps towards the inevitable rise of the superconference. John Mackovic, head coach of Illinois (and later head coach of Texas and Arizona) offered in 1990 what was then the conventional wisdom: “It wouldn’t surprise me by the year 2000 if we have only three or four major conferences with a realignment of schools and divisions. The conferences will be larger. You might have twenty-team leagues.”
The WAC’s weakness insulated it, in a way. The Southwest Conference was targeted by surrounding conferences because it had valuable properties like Arkansas. Apart from BYU, there was little in the WAC worth stealing in the eyes of the other conferences (and given its geographic and cultural isolation, even BYU was not as valuable as it might seem).
So the WAC was spared from devastation. And when the Southwest Conference disintegrated in 1996, three of that conference’s teams — Rice, TCU, and SMU — joined the WAC. This was a major coup; those three schools might have been the weak links in the Southwest Conference, but they were still “major conference” programs. And the WAC wasn’t done. Having assumed that the superconference revolution was now at hand, the WAC raided the nearby Great West conference for Fresno State, UNLV, and San Jose State. Independent University of Tulsa made 16 members for the WAC, the first of the supposedly inevitable superconferences.
It was also the last. The WAC’s heady, long-term strategy of being the first to reach sixteen teams was undermined by the practical problems that came with running a conference stretching from Tulsa to Honolulu. For example, if split into two eight-team divisions, the teams in one division would visit teams in the other division once every sixteen years. At that point, the teams might as well inhabit separate conferences. Apart from splitting a check from the television networks, the teams in one division would have little in common with the teams in the other.
The WAC’s inventive idea was to split the sixteen teams into four “quadrants,” each with four teams. But this plan didn’t work well, either — many traditional rivalries were severed by the quadrants, and teams that once played every season might now go five or six before seeing one another. The problem of retaining a common identity across so large a conference defied solution. And the WAC athletic programs buckled under the costs of traveling in a conference that spanned 4,000 miles.
Frustrated by the expansion, eight teams departed the WAC in 1999. Even worse, it was the traditional members — BYU, Utah, Wyoming, Air Force, Colorado State, New Mexico, and San Diego State, (along with newcomer UNLV) — that left, creating the new Mountain West Conference (“MWC”) in the process. None of the original six teams that created the WAC in 1962 retained their membership, and of the teams that had joined prior to 1980, only UTEP and Hawaii remained.
The WAC was suffering through an identity crisis. But in one sense, its identity had come into sharper focus than ever before. For decades, the WAC had straddled the ill-defined divide between the “major” and “minor” conferences. In 1992, that fuzzy line was made clear, and the WAC indisputably fell on the wrong side of it. That was that year that the seven self-declared major conferences established the Bowl Coalition, which in time developed into the Bowl Championship Series (“BCS”). Access to the top bowls was now, for all intents and purposes, open to only the top conferences, and making the new “national championship game” would become all but impossible for any team not from a top conference. All this was all true before. Never before, however, had the WAC been so clearly excluded. The WAC was not a “BCS conference,” and it could never become a BCS conference.
Still, the WAC raged against the dying of the light. The departure of the MWC teams left the WAC with vacancies to fill; it killed off the Big West as a football conference for good in 2000 by admitting Nevada and Boise State. (Utah State’s application was denied.) The WAC chose well. Boise State followed in the tradition of Arizona State and BYU, running roughshod over the rest of the conference. Boise State in 2007 would be the first WAC team to attend a BCS bowl –fittingly, the Fiesta Bowl — since Arizona State’s departure from the conference (former member Utah won the Fiesta Bowl as a member of the Mountain West Conference in 2005).
Nevada did not achieve Boise State’s level of success; in fact, Nevada struggled in its first few years in the WAC. In 2004, former Nevada head coach Chris Ault, who was then working as the school’s athletic director, fired his head coach and hired himself as the replacement. Proving that old coaches can learn new tricks, Ault introduced the “pistol” formation to Division I college football upon his return in an attempt to rejuvenate his new, old program. It worked; Nevada won 13 games in 2010, the only time in program history that it won more than nine games as a member of the FBS. It is only slight hyperbole to say that the two major innovations in offensive football since 1970 to hit the NFL from college — the West Coast Offense and the pistol — were both born, at least in part, in the WAC.
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Conference expansion had critically wounded the WAC at the turn of the century; it finished the job a decade later. Just as the Big Ten launched the first round of chaos by inviting Penn State in 1989, it launched the second round by inviting Nebraska in 2010. One domino felled another. The MWC lost Utah and TCU to the Pac-12 and Big 12, respectively, and in turn raided the WAC for replacements. Boise State, Nevada, and Fresno State left for the MWC, leaving the WAC looking once again for new blood.
But the bottom of the barrel had been scraped clean. When previously faced with vacancies, the WAC had turned to independent programs or those from still-lower conferences. By 2012, there was no lower conference than the WAC, and teams like now-independent BYU valued their freedom more than membership in the failing arrangement. The WAC was forced to invite Texas State, Texas-San Antonio, and Texas-Arlington just to get to seven members in 2012. None of these three teams even competed at the FBS level prior to 2012. These desperate attempts to salvage the conference only caused those others that remained to seek whatever refuge they could.
The patient could not be saved. 2012 was the last year for the WAC as a football conference. After fifty years, football’s first mid-major conference perished.
The only team to refuse the Mountain West’s advances — at least at first — was Utah State, which had been admitted to the WAC in 2005 in one of the conference’s increasingly frequent and increasingly desperate searches for new members. Utah State’s loyalty was undeserved. It was the WAC’s exclusion of Utah State in 1962, after all, which effectively destroyed the Aggies football program. But after over forty years and eight rejected applications, Utah State perhaps overvalued their membership in the dying WAC. So the Aggies stuck around refused the life rafts offered by other conferences while everyone else bolted for the exits.
Utah State was saved, eventually, by the MWC, where it will played from 2013 onward. But first, the Aggies extracted one small measure of revenge for two generations of exclusion. In 2012, Utah State went undefeated against a surprisingly feisty WAC, which — despite its desperation for members — included two teams ranked in the final AP poll. Utah State will forever more be the champions of the WAC. The title might not be worth much, but the Aggies earned it.
