Making Sense of the Wild West in College Basketball

As Oregon celebrated a win over Colorado on March 16 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, the overhanging realization was knowing the final Pac-12 Tournament Championship game signified the demise of a once powerful conference.

For some conferences, however, the Pac-12’s demise also presents a new era of opportunity. As the Pac-12’s schools are dispersed in other leagues, there is now a void of a Power 5 league whose roots go deep in the western United States. As the Pac-12 fades away and as such its traditional dominance of the spotlight on college tournament week in Las Vegas, the four other conferences that host tournaments in Las Vegas — Mountain West, West Coast Conference, Big West and WAC — now have their eyes on what it could mean for their respective business.

“That void of an FBS league in the Western region is one that we’re really well poised to fill,” said Mountain West Commissioner Gloria Nevarez. “We’re celebrating our 25th season and (the Pac-12) was a 108-year-old league, so if you think about what our group has achieved in 25 years, the trajectory is pretty steep, upward and rapid.”

The Mountain West would seem to the be the logical choice to benefit most from the Pac-12’s disappearance. The conference is enjoying its best men’s basketball season ever, with six members qualifying for the NCAA Tournament. Mountain West women’s basketball may not have the same depth but at the top is a UNLV program that has risen rapidly in the past three years.

“The Mountain West is an elite league top to bottom and night-in, night-out, you’re going to have a great game,” said Colorado State forward Joel Scott. “I think the Mountain West is in a great position and there’s not really much else it needs to do except keep pushing forward.”

“The Mountain West showed it can be really competitive and can play with the top talent in the country,” added UNLV guard Ashley Scoggin, who helped lead the Lady Rebels to a third-straight conference tournament championship. “As UNLV keeps progressing — we have everything at our disposal here — it can be the top women’s program in a conference out west.”

The Mountain West has seen ticket sales and attendance increase across the conference and specifically at the men’s and women’s tournaments in Las Vegas, which leads one to be inclined that it could fill the Pac-12’s now-vacant spot at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas during conference tournament week.

In the Mountain West’s 25 years of existence, it has hosted the conference tournament at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas for 22 years, with a three-year detour in Denver from 2004–2006. The conference has an agreement to play at the Thomas & Mack Center through the 2025 event; any move, let alone to T-Mobile in 2026, would require a majority vote from the conference’s 11 basketball-playing institutions.

“We signed a one-year deal (for 2024) with Thomas & Mack before I got hired, to give the new commissioner time to get on board,” Nevarez said. “A lot happened in that year, so we’re doing another year to really continue to analyze that. Thomas & Mack has been amazing and our friends here at UNLV are just wonderful. But there’s a lot of opportunities and we need time to dig into that.”

In the wild world of college realignment, the Mountain West now is in the position of having a football arrangement for 2024 that will see the two Pac-12 schools remaining — Oregon State and Washington State — play six games against Mountain West opponents.

“The environment is changing every minute,” Nevarez said of permanently adding Oregon State and Washington State as full members. “I have a lot of deep connections, a lot of respect for both schools and both ADs. But we’re feeling pretty good about our trajectory and about our membership right now. So we’ll see what the future looks like. I think a lot of it depends on the CFP. Hopefully we’ll hit a little bit of stability here and be able to take a deep breath and figure some things out.”

One thing that would need to be figured out is knowing Oregon State and Washington State have already agreed in every other sport but football and baseball to have an affiliation … with one of the Mountain West’s regional counterparts.

West Coast Shake Up

Across the Las Vegas Strip from UNLV, less than five miles away, is Orleans Arena, which is where the West Coast Conference has held its men’s and women’s conference tournaments since 2009. As Oregon State and Washington State join the conference tournament party next season, how the WCC could benefit going forward is to be determined.

“We had a discussion with ESPN and there may be some advantages to the WCC as far as broadcast windows or times that we could play, which would ultimately give us more exposure than we have now,” West Coast Conference Commissioner Stu Jackson said. “From a financial standpoint, it remains to be seen. I can’t emphasize enough that we should control what we can control and know that if we continue to become more competitive by adding either affiliate members, or full-time members, that ultimately those rewards financially will come to us.”

The rewards competitively with the addition of Oregon State and Washington State are clear to Randy Bennett, who has been the head coach of St. Mary’s men’s basketball since 2001, and has seen it all throughout the years. This season, the Gaels won both the WCC regular season and tournament titles and will be heading to their 10th NCAA Tournament under Bennett.

“It forces others that are in the middle of the league to step it up,” Bennett said. “Adding Oregon State and Washington State gives this league strong depth and that’s the way our conference has to look at it … in this new NIL age, you don’t need to have the most money, but you need to do a good job with what you have. You can’t go lowball; you have to go money ball.”

Having Oregon State and Washington State will help the WCC’s profile with St. Mary’s, Gonzaga and the University of San Francisco. The impact will be felt more on the women’s basketball side, as the Beavers enter the NCAA Women’s Tournament as a No. 3 seed in its region and Washington State earned a No. 1 seed in the inaugural 2024 Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament. While Gonzaga earned a No. 4 seed in its region of the NCAA Tournament, only four WCC women’s programs finished with winning records this season.

“Adding those teams make our league more competitive because they’re outstanding programs,” said Portland women’s basketball coach Michael Meek, whose Pilots pulled off a massive upset over the Zags in the WCC championship to reach the NCAA Tournament. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that they’re going to raise the competitiveness of our league, which is already an awesome league and is always in the top 10 in the nation and now is going to be even stronger.”

While the WCC looks to further capitalize on the Pac-12’s decline, the landscape dictates it also must keep an eye on its current schools as Gonzaga for months as been rumored to be targeted by the Big 12.

“Gonzaga is a member of the WCC and in all indications of dealing with them over the past year, their focus is the WCC and helping us become stronger and more financially stable,” Jackson said. “But we’re in a national landscape — in big part due to football realignment — where there’s going to be a shuffle. And we’ve seen it over the past seven months and it’s going to continue. I’m not surprised that other conferences would be interested in Gonzaga and other members of our conference. But the WCC is a great place to be.”

Big West Eyes Continued Growth

With so much drama of realignment changing affiliations of so many conferences, the Big West has remained mostly unfazed. The conference comprised of 10 California institutions and Hawaii has no football, which helps a lot in that respect.

That fact allows Big West Commissioner Dan Butterly, who took control of the conference in May 2020 amidst the pandemic, to make basketball a priority. A contract with ESPN Plus that calls for at least 600 league broadcasts a year now numbers around 1,500. The Big West was ranked the 24th-best men’s basketball conference four years ago and that has improved to nearly 15th.

The Big West moved its men’s and women’s conference tournaments to Las Vegas in 2021 and recently hosted its third event at the Dollar Loan Center in Henderson outside of Vegas. So far, everything has been a success for the Big West in Vegas, except for attendance numbers. It’s something Butterly is constantly looking to improve and the Pac-12 leaving town may help draw some bigger crowds.

“Operationally and game management-wise, everything that the teams want and everything the student-athletes need for a great experience is there,” Butterly said. “We have to continue to work on growing attendance and it is a challenge. It’s the last Pac-12 Tournament ever. The Mountain West has six teams in the NCAA tournament. And then you have the WAC and us, that don’t necessarily have that prestige. We’re building on that prestige, but we still have work to do. There are still seats that are sitting empty. And we have to do what we can to continue to grow.”

The Big West has cut ticket prices and this year began offering free parking at the tournament. The conference promotes a family environment and is hoping to get more fans to come from Orange County and Hawaii, in addition to the locals who enjoy basketball in person.

“A lot of the effort this year was focusing on social media advertising to find out where the Henderson fanbases are,” Butterly said. “We’re not necessarily trying to expand it all the way over to the Strip, but geotarget marketing with the limited resources we have to make sure we’re targeting the right people in the right areas that are college basketball fans.

“We’re trying to get where people are, which is where their phone is, because that’s what people are looking at. Putting up big billboards is great for branding, but it doesn’t sell a ticket.”

While the college merry-go-round continues to spin, the Big West, which added Cal State Bakersfield and UC San Diego as full-time members in 2020 to get to 11 schools, isn’t in a rush to add at the moment.

“Back in November, our membership said we’re not interested in expansion and let’s continue to work with this model,” Butterly said. “We can play everybody twice in basketball, which is important in this league. But we’ve had interest and we continue to have conversations, because the landscape is going to continue to shift.”