Despite reports that BYU is doing a heavy lean toward remaining a member of the Mountain West Conference, the WAC still hasn’t given up all hope of pulling the Cougars into their conference in all sports but football.
Speaking to the Salt Lake Tribune, commissioner Karl Benson said talks with BYU are far from as dead as they’ve been portrayed and that negotiations are ongoing that would, in the end, allow the school to make a go of it as a football independent while offering a landing spot for its non-football sports.
“Both sides are still working on a deal that will be beneficial to the WAC and to BYU,” Benson told the paper.
Apparently, part of those talks includes beefing up what would currently be a six-school conference after, at the latest, the 2011-2012 school year, a number that would not satisfy the NCAA’s requirements for a football or basketball conference. The WAC has reportedly approached Conference USA members Houston, SMU and UTEP about the possibility of jumping leagues.
BYU has also been engaged in talks with ESPN regarding a potential football deal with the network, but the ESPN executive quoted in this article speaks in the past tense when it comes to football independence for the school.
“I think they could have slipped right into our mechanism to fill schedules and word would have spread pretty quickly that they had availability,” senior vice president of college sports programming Burke Magnus told the Birmingham News. “They have a history of having pretty good teams coming to play in Provo. Texas just did a home-and-home with them. They had Notre Dame there over the years. I presume they’ll continue to play Utah. I think it would have been an interesting proposition to have sort of the mountain version of Notre Dame.”
One thing seems to be certain in this whole convoluted situation: there will be an answer, one way or the other, by Sept. 1 as that’s the deadline for BYU to notify the MWC of their conference intentions.
