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Two's company, but it's not a league
Published: 5/5/2012 6:39 PM
Last Modified: 5/5/2012 6:39 PM

Lost amid the news that Tulsa’s current league (Conference USA) will be adding new members is this:

One of TU’s old leagues (the Western Athletic Conference) is very much on life support.

Because the Mountain West and C-USA went cherry-picking, the WAC will be left with two football-playing members (Idaho, New Mexico State) in 2013. Let me repeat that: Two members. Two. Never has the phrase “league of their own” been quite so truthful.

Tulsa owes the WAC a big thanks. TU spent a decade as a college football independent (that’s rough duty, unless you have a contract with NBC) before finding a home in the 16-team WAC in 1996.

The super-size WAC was the biggest league in the country and it was immediately criticized as being too “spread out.”

Timeout for a geography-based rant: It’s weird that people only view “spread out” when they are thinking in terms of east and west. Put Tulsa and San Diego State (1,460 miles apart) in the same conference and folks are eager to ridicule the marriage. But put Syracuse and Miami (1,426 miles apart) in the same league and no one thinks twice about it.

Back to the subject: Tulsa’s time in the 16-team WAC was one of the coolest athletic periods in the university’s history.

Sure, Missouri Valley Conference basketball was (in a good way) brutal. But you’re judged by the company you keep and TU was keeping company with BYU, UNLV, Utah, Fresno State (Tark was the hoops coach), TCU (Billy Tubbs was the hoops coach), New Mexico, Hawaii, Wyoming, Colorado State, San Jose State, San Diego State, TCU, SMU, Rice and UTEP.

Sure, not everyone in the club was a name brand, but the WAC seemed to be paving the way for an era of mega-conferences. Now the megaconferences are here and, thanks to greed and impatience, the WAC is not one of them.

There wasn’t immediately enough money in the pot following WAC expansion. Some of the “old” WAC members wanted a bigger slice of the pie. They divorced the WAC, leaving some longtime partners behind in favor of prettier girls.

The behind-everyone’s-back meeting that resulted in the creation of the Mountain West Conference was (my opinion) as dirty than Charlie Brown’s buddy, Pig-Pen. Was this said at the secret meeting?: “Hey, let’s hurry up and get a knife in these folks’ backs before they suggest some compromises that might result in everyone sticking together.”

Because of who the Mountain West selected, the downsized WAC was essentially left with an east and a west, but no middle. Whatever geographic problems existed before the split were all of a sudden magnified.

The WAC kept repopulating with new members after subsequent defections and did such a good job that its “recruits” (Boise State, for instance) got cherry-picked by other leagues, too. The WAC was winning “Survivor” long before it was a TV show.

Now the WAC seems to have run out of prospects if the league wants to continue playing big boy football. And I feel badly for people I know at the WAC headquarters, like interim commissioner Jeff Hurd, who, once upon a time, worked at TU.

Hurd has been the WAC’s interim commissioner since Karl Benson (who surely saw the writing on the wall) opted to become the Sun Belt commissioner. Hurd is telling media outlets the WAC will survive. Again. For his sake, I hope so. But he's faced with the task of getting the league off life support and into reconstructive surgery.


Reader Comments 2 Total
amron warrior (10 months ago)
I also haven't seen anything in the World yet emphasizing how deluted the competition will be in the reconstituted C-USA. The new schools won't be a drawing card here. It's an RPI death knell. What a shame that TU got left out of the defection to the Big East.
Long Live Gusty! (10 months ago)
I agree that the pre-defection WAC period was Tulsa's best conference affiliation. The cowardly secret meeting where some of the schools slunk away to form the MWC is one of the most infamous episodes of athletic treachery. Sorry to see the WAC fall on hard times.
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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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