The WAC took nine schools over the years -including Boise State and founding members Fresno State and San Diego State - which surely helped the Big West's decision. The Big West also took a step down, giving up on football in 2000 after trying over and over to swell beyond its California borders. Western Athletic Conference escapee Louisiana Tech must be looking forward to shaking that punch line. It now has a bunch of schools that aren't actually in the Rockies, proving conference branding has been a problem at all levels for decades. The Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, once home to future WAC schools BYU, Colorado and Utah, left Division I in 1937. Some conferences that vanish from the national eye only self-relegate to a more manageable level. By September, one fifth of all 125 FBS teams will have played football as WAC members. It's always been a conference composed of the living bits of dead bodies. If there's one thing the Southland and almost every other former major college football conference from the modern era (except the Ivy!) has in common, it's that some of their teams ended up in the WAC. The WAC will reach 51 football years, but probably not 52, despite taking Louisiana Tech and three other schools from the Southland over the years. The Texas-centric Southland only made it seven years at the I-A level, but has survived nearly 50 years anyway, now boasting the FCS title game near its headquarters. (And that's the risk you take when you build a 16,000-seat gym for Division I college football games.) Conferences die all the time, and for most small athletic departments, choosing which to associate with amounts to not much more than guessing correctly. That's the risk the schools took when they both left the Sun Belt in 2004 to join the WAC. It would take a miracle bigger than the 1980 Holiday Bowl for Idaho and New Mexico State to remain as top-level programs beyond this season, no matter how many politicians we'd like to involve. The WAC's only option to stay alive as a FBS conference is to convince a half-dozen FCS teams to suddenly ramp up their budgets, which did not go over well the last time the WAC proposed it. By all accounts, the first 16-team superconference will soon be down to two football schools.
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