Kelly Lyell

kellylyell@coloradoan.com

Sorry, Boise State, CSU has become the darling of the Mountain West.

Not necessarily in athletic success.

But in terms of conference expansion.

Should the Big 12 Conference move forward with plans to expand from 10 schools to 12 or 14, possibly before the 2017 football season, Colorado State University is the MW school most often mentioned as a potential member. Not Boise State, San Diego State, New Mexico or UNLV, the schools previously in the mix for inclusion in one of the Power 5 conferences if it were to add new teams from the West.

Now, it’s BYU and CSU — two long-time rivals who joined forces with Utah to break away from a 16-team Western Athletic Conference to form the Mountain West in 1999. BYU left the MW in 2011 in favor of playing an independent schedule in football and joined the West Coast Conference for most other sports.

CSU remains in the Mountain West and is doing its best not to ruffle feathers with its current conference while courting the Big 12 and the tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue membership in that conference would bring.

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“We want to be the very best version of Colorado State University that we can be,” athletic director Joe Parker said in May, when talk of Big 12 expansion began to heat up. “And, in doing that, I think that we will hopefully garner some attention and maybe be able to enter into a dialog or conversation about whether we would be a likely option for expansion if expansion is going to be contemplated.”

The Big 12, conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby said July 19, is contemplating expansion, with invitations possible as early as this fall. And CSU is clearly in the discussion, along with a half-dozen or so other schools, mostly from the American Athletic Conference.

CSU could leave the MW as early as next summer but would have to sacrifice the greater of $5 million or double its annual conference revenue distribution, MW spokesman Javan Hedlund said. Were the Rams, or any other MW school, to notify the conference before July 1, 2016, of its intent to leave for the 2018-19 school year, the only cost would be its revenue distribution for its final year in the conference.

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CSU received $3.38 million in revenue distribution from the conference in 2015-16, executive associate athletic director Steve Cottingham said. Big 12 schools received $31.2 million apiece from their media rights agreements with ESPN and Fox Sports, Bowlsby said during the conference’s spring meetings in May. Additional revenue from third-tier partners, such as Texas’ Longhorn Network and Oklahoma’s Sooner Network, goes only to those schools and is not shared by the rest of the conference.

“The gap financially between the Power 5 and Group of 5 conferences has gotten so outrageous, that if you have a chance, you’ve got to take it,” San Diego State football coach Rocky Long said Wednesday at the MW football media days in Las Vegas.

When the last shift in conference affiliation took place in 2011-12, CSU was never mentioned as a candidate to move into any of the six leagues that then made up the Bowl Championship Series. Boise State and San Diego State were part of the mix and were headed to the Big East until that conference imploded, with those that didn’t play football breaking away and taking the league name with them.

Five years later, the Rams have taken the necessary steps to become the Mountain West team most likely to move on to a Power 5 conference. Yes, that means ahead of Boise State, the darling of schools in the Group of 5 conferences for the past decade, with three appearances and three victories in the Fiesta Bowl since 2007, and a share of the MW men’s basketball title in 2014-15.

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If college sports fans, coaches or athletic directors were the ones deciding what schools should play in which conferences, the Broncos would be a strong candidate for the Big 12. Maybe even the strongest.

But university presidents make these decisions. And the strength of a school’s academic programs, real and perceived, matters. That’s where Boise State’s candidacy falls apart while the Rams rise top the top.

There’s no definitive way to rank a school’s academic programs. But those who have tried, Forbes and U.S. News & World Report, do not shine favorably on Boise State, which was a junior college from its founding in 1934 until 1965.

The school is ranked No. 612 overall among universities by Forbes, which has CSU at No. 297 and all but one Big 12 school — West Virginia at No. 412 — among the top 350. Boise State isn’t listed at all in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of the nation’s top 212 universities. CSU is tied for No. 127 on that list, putting it ahead of four current Big 12 members.

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CSU hasn’t won as many football games in recent years as Boise State or as many men’s basketball games during the past decade as San Diego State or UNLV, other programs in the MW that have been previously mentioned as candidates for membership in Power 5 conferences. But the Rams have been dominant in their other two revenue sports, winning seven straight conference titles and playing in the NCAA tournament 21 consecutive years in volleyball, and winning three straight MW regular-season championships in women’s basketball.

No school in the country, in fact, has a better winning percentage in CSU’s four revenue sports — football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and volleyball — over the past two years than CSU’s .779 (173-49).

So, CSU is holding its own on the courts and fields, as well as in the classroom, a point Parker won’t hesitate to share with the folks he worked with during previous stints in athletic administration at Big 12 schools Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech, where he spent five years as the deputy AD before coming to CSU 15 months ago.

Parker and football coach Mike Bobo insist that potential membership in the Big 12 was not discussed by CSU President Tony Frank when they each were hired.

“I didn’t take the job because there was a chance to go the Big 12 or be in a Power 5 (conference),” Bobo said Tuesday. “I took the job because Fort Collins was a great place to live, I thought we had a chance to win and I love who I was working for in the school president.

“I think those are some things that made Colorado State attractive. It’s a great academic school, you’ve got 30,000-plus students, you’re building a brand-new stadium, you’re close to Denver. All those things, the TV market, all those things are appealing.

“But what I want to do is put the best product we can on and off the field for Colorado State.”

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Frank, though, clearly knew the direction he wanted to take CSU’s athletic program when he hired Bobo in December 2014 after losing football coach Jim McElwain to Florida in exchange for a $7 million buyout that helped fund the hiring of Bobo, a longtime Georgia assistant, and his staff.

It was part of Frank’s stated goal of raising the quality of the school’s athletic program to the level of its strong academic programs. He pushed through funding increases that have allowed the school to lure quality coaches. He kept the new $220 million on-campus football stadium, with a total capacity of 41,200, on track even after firing the man who got the project off the ground, former AD Jack Graham.

CSU just might be the right school in the right place at the right time.

The Denver television market, which includes Fort Collins, is the 17th-largest in the country. And Denver’s airport, a little more than an hour’s drive away, ranks No. 4 nationally in the number of daily scheduled flights.

CSU has more than 32,000 students, with plans to reach 35,000 in four years. The school has spent more than $1.3 billion on facility upgrades across campus in the past 10 years and is setting new records every year in fundraising, with more than $197 million pledged in 2015-16. Its annual research expenditures of more than $317 in 2014-15 hold a national ranking of No. 75 in over the past decade, according to the National Science Foundation.

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As Frank pointed out in an email to West Virginia University President Gordon Gee, a member of that conference’s membership committee, CSU is a growing, major university with a lot to offer.

It would be a good fit for the Big 12, which already has four schools in two adjacent states (Kansas and Oklahoma) and four more that are just a panhandle away in Texas. Three of those schools (Iowa State, Kansas State and Oklahoma State) are land-grant universities offering many of the same academic programs as CSU.

When it comes to a Mountain West school leaving for the Big 12, CSU is the only candidate that makes sense.

“In my opinion, which is not an educated one, I would think that Colorado State would be the most logical choice coming out of the league,” Nevada coach Brian Polian said. “But if there’s one team, because Colorado State has such a high academic reputation, it delivers the Denver media market, plus the new stadium. If somebody was going to go, I could see it.”

Follow reporter Kelly Lyell at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news

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