Hawaii joins Mountain West

The University of Hawaii announced today that they will leave the Western Athletic Conference for the Mountain West Conference in football, while their other sports will join the Big West Conference.

This move is not a surprise; in fact, rumors of talks between Hawaii and the MWC have been floating for about a month now.

The MWC has lost its three most successful programs over the course of the last year.

Utah has left to join the new Pac-12, BYU has gone independent in football and TCU is joining the Big East.

In response, the MWC has raided the four best teams from the WAC: Boise State, Nevada, Fresno State, and now Hawaii.

This move may prove to be a death blow to the WAC.

The conference has lost all four teams that finished this year with winning records. The teams that remain are Idaho, Louisiana Tech, Utah State, San Jose State, and New Mexico State.

The WAC will add UT San Antonio and Texas State in all sports, and the University of Denver, which doesn't have a football team.

In order for the WAC to remain a football conference, it must have eight teams.

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In what could be pricey early Christmas gifts, the University of Hawaii announced yesterday that it received — and accepted — invitations to join the Mountain West Conference in football and the Big West Conference in all other sports except men's volleyball, sailing and swimming and diving.

The Big West does not compete in football, and UH's men's volleyball and swimming teams are members of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation.

"This is what our coaches and what our fans want," UH athletic director Jim Donovan said, "and we delivered."

UH will secede from the Western Athletic Conference on June 30, 2012. UH is the WAC's senior member, having joined in 1979.

The announced departures of Boise State, Fresno State, Nevada and UH will leave the WAC with seven football-playing schools in 2012, including Texas State and Texas-San Antonio, both of which will join that year.

Donovan said the geography of the WAC was moving eastward, "and the concern I had was eventually some of those schools would start asking for travel subsidies because of the cost, for them, to travel to Hawaii."

Instead, UH will participate in "cost sharing" — meaning it will pay subsidies — for Mountain West and Big West schools traveling to Hawaii. The payments will involve only airfare, not hotel stays, according to UH officials. They declined to provide estimates, noting negotiations were ongoing.

UH will relinquish the television rights to its sports to the Mountain West and Big West.

UH currently earns $450,000 annually as its share of a deal between the WAC and sports cable-television network ESPN.

In addition, UH earns roughly $2.5 million, mostly from pay-per-view subscriptions, in a deal with Oceanic Time Warner Cable and television station KFVE.

The Mountain West has national television deals with the CBS College Sports Network, Versus and Mountain. In 2009 all but four football games involving Mountain West teams were shown on those channels. If the same arrangements were in place in 2012, most UH games would not be available for pay-per-view sales. Oceanic's UH rights are superseded by the Mountain West's national contract.

However, each Mountain West team receives about $1.45 million a year from the national television deal. And with the loss of three key members, UH, if it had chosen to remain in the WAC, would receive a reduced share, probably about $100,000 annually, from the WAC's deal with ESPN.

In debating whether to leave the WAC, Donovan said, the leadership committee decided "we couldn't afford not to do it."