Gonzaga Basketball: Why moving to the Mountain West is a bad idea

Beware of football conferences

This is the main reason why if I was Gonzaga I’d be nervous about joining the Mountain West. A few years ago, conference realignment altered the landscape of college sports everywhere, and there were clearly some winners and losers.

At one moment, the biggest loser was the seven remaining teams from the original Big East Conference, who after several defections had to scramble to find teams, and literally their name. That’s because the motivation for teams moving had to do with the football side, which is the ultimate moneymaker for most schools.

Look at teams like UConn, South Florida and Cincinnati for example. Those teams went from a stable conference to basically homeless, needing a whole new conference to be created for them.

Now the situation is different out west, with only the Pac-12 the other spot for these teams to go to. But football rules the college landscape, and Gonzaga doesn’t have a say in that regard. They also quite frankly loses all leverage once they arrive, with all decisions likely to be decided by the originals like San Diego State, UNLV and Nevada. BYU wanted to have more influence and a say, and look how that turned out.

Next: 2018 WCC Conference Tournament preview

If Gonzaga does decide to move forward with this, there certainly are positives to going to the Mountain West. But it’s not as big a slam dunk as many people think it is. Although for some Gonzaga fans, the status quo is simply not an option.