With the College Football Playoff being introduced last year and the Big 12 missing out with a split champion and no championship game, the subject of conference re-alignment reappeared. It was hotly debated last season as to which two teams the Big 12 would add to get back up to twelve, enabling them to host a championship game like the other Power Five conferences to help improve the strength of schedule of their playoff hopefuls.
Fast forward one year and suddenly things look very different; the rule around a conference needing twelve teams to host a championship game have been scrapped. But more importantly, Oklahoma made the playoffs this season and arguably benefited from not having to play a championship game. They were the #3 team and a certainty for the playoff in championship week as they didn’t have to play. Although conference re-alignment is less of an issue this year, it doesn’t mean there hasn’t been developments this off-season.
The major news in the Group of Five conferences is that the Sun Belt has announced that both Idaho and New Mexico State were leaving the conference after the 2017 season. Both schools were football only members who have effectively been kicked out and left in a perilous position. The Mountain West Conference already told both schools to “move onto Plan B” when they inquired about joining.
Both schools’ desire to stay in the Sun Belt was shown by the sheer distance they had to travel for road games. New Mexico State’s nearest conference opponent is Georgia Southern, which is over 1,000 miles away, while Idaho was travelling over 2,000 miles to reach Arkansas State. The news that these schools have two more seasons before being without a conference could signal the end of their run in the FBS.
Rumors are already swirling that Idaho will re-join the Big Sky, where they had a lot of success in the late eighties and early nineties, while New Mexico State seems to be more determined to survive at the FBS level. Realistically, it seems unlikely that either team would survive as an independent for longer than a few years.
A possibility for both schools is to follow what UMass has done; they played their final games as a member of the Mid-American Conference in 2015 and will now play as an independent. The UMass athletic director Ryan Bamford said the school was “in a kind of holding pattern as it waits to see how the rest of the college football landscape shakes out – it’s typically thought that another shift in conference re-alignment will start if/when the Big 12 decides its own future of expansion”. <http://www.masslive.com/umassfootball/index.ssf/2015/12/umass_ad_ryan_bamford_explains.html>
So the small slither of hope for both Idaho and New Mexico State is that the football landscape could be very different by the end of 2017. If the Big 12 expands and takes two more teams then it could lead to other conferences replacing the teams they lost. If this occurs, these teams could get an invitation back into one of the Group of Five conferences.
Main Photo
