WAC football champions | |
---|---|
Conference Football Champions | |
Western Athletic Conference Logo
|
|
Sport | Football |
Conference | Western Athletic Conference |
Played | 1962–2012 |
Current champion | Utah State Aggies (Final Champion) |
Most championships | BYU Cougars (19) |
Official website | WACSports.com Football |
The Western Athletic Conference sponsored football and crowned a champion every year from 1962 to 2012. Once considered one of the best conferences in college football, steady attrition from 1999-2012 forced the WAC to drop football after fifty-one years.
The WAC has 26 former football-playing members.
The Western Athletic Conference staged a conference title football game during the three years (1996–98) the league consisted of sixteen members. During this time, the league was split into two divisions, Pacific and Mountain, with eight teams in each division. The top finisher in each division played for the championship, which was held at Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas. When conference membership was cut in half in 1999 with the formation of the Mountain West Conference, both the championship game and two division format were discontinued. As indicated by the table below, every team that participated in the three title games were among the defections to the MWC. The rankings next to a given team's name represent the last AP poll prior to the game being played. ABC Sports televised all three games.
The lone WAC bowl game tie-in for the 2012–13 postseason was the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.
The WAC champion received an automatic berth in one of the five BCS bowl games if they were the highest ranked non-automatic qualifying conference champion and either of the following:
By qualifying under the first criterion above, the 2006 Boise State football team landed a berth in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, and the 2007 Hawaii Warriors football team received a bid to play in the 2008 Sugar Bowl. In 2009 the Mountain West champion TCU received the automatic BCS bid by finishing higher than Boise State in the final BCS rankings; however, the Broncos received an at-large BCS bid to the 2010 Fiesta Bowl. In three BCS bowl games, the WAC boasted a record of two wins and one loss. In addition to those three teams that played in BCS bowls, four other WAC teams qualified for a BCS berth but were not selected for a bid, including TCU in 2000 and Boise State in 2004, 2008, and 2010.