Conference realignment has torn up college football like it’s taking a 1979 Ford Pinto to the junkyard and selling it for scraps. But now it’s going too far. Now it needs to be stopped. Because it’s coming for the MAC and our beloved MACtion.
It all comes down to the standoff of mutual annihilation between the Pac-12 and the Mountain West. After the Pac-12 raided five MWC teams, both conference are now left with seven members beginning in the 2025-2026 season, which is one short of the needed level to be an FBS conference. And instead of doing the obvious thing and merging, the two leagues are now locked in litigation and looking elsewhere to fill out their numbers.
Enter the MAC.
According to two separate reports from Brett McMurphy and Pete Thamel, at least Northern Illinois and perhaps Toledo could draw interest from the Mountain West as new members. Thamel also mentioned Texas State from the Sun Belt as a potential target.
Mountain West notifies the MAC of its interest in NIU & Toledo as football-only members in 2026, sources told @ActionNetworkHQ. This adds Central Time Zone to MW, potentially increasing future media rights value. NIU & Toledo have combined for 7 of last 13 MAC titles. MW…
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) September 27, 2024
Sources: Texas State has emerged as a target for Mountain West expansion, which would be an all sports addition. One other target that could soon come into focus for the Mountain West is Northern Illinois, which would be as a football only member.
— Pete Thamel (@PeteThamel) September 27, 2024
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Dekalb, Illinois or Toledo, Ohio but there are no mountains in sight in either location. And they haven’t been considered the “west” since before the time of Lewis and Clark.
Toledo and Northern Illinois have had a lot of success in the MAC in recent years and NIU shocked the college football world when they went into South Bend and defeated Notre Dame on their home turf.
But it’s less about a shift in the balance of power in the Group of Five conferences, or however many millions Toledo and NIU might be worth to whatever television deal the Mountain West Conference believes they can get with their addition. It’s more about the symbolism of just how far conference realignment is willing to go to cannibalize the sport.
If there’s been one safe space from the madness, it’s been the MAC. The Mid-American Conference is a collection of like-minded schools, mostly in Ohio and Michigan. The only real move the conference has made through realignment is the addition of the University of Massachusetts, which admittedly is a little peculiar, but apparently every conference has to have at least one outlier. And UMass is an independent in football currently. Most of the conference has been together for decades with the next most recent addition Buffalo all the way back in 1998.
For the most part though, the MAC has minded their own business through conference realignment. Nobody is going to confuse them with a college football predator, scouring the landscape for vulnerable prey. If the MAC is known for anything, it’s marching to the beat of their own drum. College football has embraced #MACtion as a unique tradition that features games early in the week on Tuesdays and Wednesdays away from the rest of the crowded college football calendar. It’s never going to match Georgia-Alabama or Ohio State-Oregon, but at least it means something.
Were the Mountain West to draw Toledo and Northern Illinois into the hot mess out west, it would just be another tear at the fabric of what makes college football unique and special. Toledo should be playing Ohio on a Tuesday night in November, not traveling to Wyoming. But in a world where Stanford-Syracuse is an ACC rivalry and the Pac-12 went as far as pursuing the University of South Florida, there are truly no guardrails.
