2010–12 Mountain West Conference realignment

The 2010–13 Mountain West Conference realignment refers to the Mountain West Conference (formally abbreviated as MW since July 2011; also MWC) dealing with several proposed and actual conference expansion and reduction plans among various NCAA conferences and institutions from 2010 to 2013. Moves that involved the MW were part of a much larger NCAA conference realignment in which the MW was one of the more impacted conferences. During this period, four schools that had been members at the beginning of the realignment cycle announced plans to join other conferences, and six schools announced plans to join the conference (five as all-sports members, and one for football only). Two schools—one a pre-2010 member, and the other joining during the cycle—had announced their upcoming departure, but later decided to stay in the MW.

In 1996, the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) took advantage of the demise of the Southwest Conference (SWC) to expand from 10 members to 16, bringing in new members from the SWC, Big West Conference, and Missouri Valley Conference. This arrangement, however, proved to be less than satisfactory to most of the pre-1996 members, as the conference now spanned from Hawaii to Oklahoma—a distance of about 3,900 miles (6,300 km) and four time zones. As a result, the presidents of five of the pre-1996 members—the United States Air Force Academy (Air Force), Brigham Young University (BYU), Colorado State University, the University of Utah, and the University of Wyoming—met at Denver International Airport in 1998 and decided to form a new league. They invited two fellow pre-1996 members, the University of New Mexico and San Diego State University, plus a 1996 WAC arrival, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), to join them in the new Mountain West Conference, which began play in 1999.

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