Kelly Lyell

kellylyell@coloradoan.com

Rumors abound concerning membership changes in the Mountain West, but commissioner Craig Thompson said such moves haven’t even been discussed in the past two meetings of the conference’s Board of Governors.

There was no mention, Thompson said, of membership changes or expansion during meetings in December or March, and he doesn’t expect it to come up in the annual spring meetings next month in Arizona, either.

Thompson said there’s been no contact between the conference and Brigham Young, a former member that went independent in football in 2011-12 and joined the West Coast Conference for basketball and other sports. He said he hasn’t heard anything from New Mexico State or Idaho, either. Both schools had lobbied for a spot in the MW in the past and were left in a lurch when the WAC dropped football after the 2012 season after losing most of its football-playing schools to the MW.

The Mountain West has undergone several changes in membership since its formation in 1999. TCU joined the conference in 2005 and left for the Big 12 in 2012. Utah jumped to the Pacific-12 in 2011, the same year Boise State joined the MW. The following year, the MW added Fresno State and Nevada in all sports and Hawaii for football only. San Jose State and Utah State joined in 2013.

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“I think we’re in great shape,” Thompson recently told the Coloradoan. “… I think we’re very stable and continue to look at our formats and bowl bids, tournament formats and everything going forward with 11 in basketball and 12 in football.”

Thompson said he hears second-hand talk on a regular basis from coaches and administrators of schools that might be interested in joining the conference, but there’s been no interest on the part of the MW to expand over the past three years.

He also hears constant rumors of schools leaving for other conferences, as Boise State and San Diego State nearly did in 2013 for the Big East. That was the last time there was enough of a threat of losing members to another conference that it was discussed by the Board of Governors.

“We did not use the word ‘membership’ nor the word ‘expansion,’" Thompson said of the board’s past two meetings. “It’s been refreshing.

"We’ve done a lot of things recently, and it’s good that we haven’t addressed that; we haven’t needed to talk about that.”

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