Too many positives in MWC for Nevada to pass up

SALT LAKE CITY - Fresno State and Nevada should not expect any parting gifts from the other members of the Western Athletic Conference when the Bulldogs and Wolf Pack leave for the Mountain West.

WAC commissioner Karl Benson said on Thursday the departing schools will have to pay $5 million to his league and wait until 2012 to move after accepting the MWC's invitation and dismantling an agreement the WAC was on the verge of completing with BYU.

The Cougars were in line to rejoin the WAC in all sports other than football, in which BYU would have become an independent.

Benson called Fresno State and Nevada's decision "selfish."

"In a 12-hour period, the WAC went from having a secure and prosperous future to once again not knowing what the future will hold," Benson said in a conference call.

The WAC had already lost Boise State to the MWC earlier this summer, then the latest departures happened less than a week after WAC members formed a buyout pact intended to keep what was left of the league intact.

In the meantime, the WAC is looking for members once again. Since it formed with six teams in 1962, the WAC expanded to the point of two eight-team divisions in the mid-1990s before eight schools departed and formed the Mountain West in 1999.

The WAC has managed to persevere through all the turnover, but Wednesday's departures were a definite setback, especially if the league and BYU can't rework their agreement for the Cougars to come back, albeit without football.

Benson said the arrangement was for BYU to still play four to six WAC teams per season in football and schedule the remaining openings on its own, taking advantage of the exposure on the school's BYU-TV network.

If the Cougars are still up for it, Benson said the door is open. But he didn't seem optimistic about that possibility and the Cougars were keeping quiet for a second straight day as they considered options.

West Coast Conference commissioner Jamie Zaninovich said in an e-mail he had contacted BYU to see if the school would be interested in joining his conference but had not heard back Wednesday night. The WCC does not compete in football, which would allow BYU to remain independent and would give them another potential option if they don't want to join a depleted WAC.

The remaining WAC members are Hawaii, Utah State, New Mexico State, Louisiana Tech, San Jose State and Idaho. Benson said the league will look at other schools, including members of the Football Championship Subdivision that may be interested in moving up a division and joining.

"I would expect that we're going to continue to see other movements and additional restructuring across the board," he said. "Obviously as the WAC rebuilds we will need to look at other conferences. Unfortunately over the course of the last 15 years the WAC has done that on a fairly regular basis. When we've done it, we've done it in an aboveboard fashion."

Utah State, which joined the league with New Mexico State and Idaho in 2005, was also approached by the MWC, but the Aggies felt the agreement already in place within the WAC was binding, athletic director Scott Barnes said in an open letter released Thursday afternoon.

"We were simply committed to uphold our agreement with fellow WAC members," Barnes wrote.

While Benson still was seething, his remarks softened a little when asked about the moves from the Mountain West's standpoint and MWC commissioner Craig Thompson's quick push to get the Bulldogs and Wolf Pack on board if BYU did in fact leave.

"He has a job to do and I have a job to do. Our jobs are to put our respective organizations in the best possible position for success for our member institutions. I don't look at it as necessarily predatory," he said. "I think we're all chasing the BCS. We're chasing recognition and notoriety and we're chasing the financial benefits that come with the BCS."