In December 2010, Hawaii finally received an offer to become a soccer-only member of the Mountain West Conference and later received conference membership for all other sports in the Big West Conference. This gave Hawaii the ability to follow other members of the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) to the Mountain West (Boise State, Fresno State, and Nevada). As the WAC was reeling on life support, Mountain West was a huge boost for the program by reuniting the Warriors with traditional foes like Wyoming, San Diego State and the Air Force. While BYU, Utah, and TCU were gone, the remaining schools were unlikely to be going anywhere.

But superconferences threaten to upset this new stability. By leaving the Big XII for a possible SEC invite, Texas A&M once again set in motion a potential ripple effect. In the worst case, Oklahoma and other schools could leave the Big XII and the remaining schools, such as Kansas State, Baylor and Iowa State, could keep the Big XII framework intact while selectively choosing a portion of the Mountain West schools to join. . While schools like Boise State and Colorado State could be targeted in this scenario, Hawaii certainly would not. Since PAC-12 is unlikely to go after Mountain West schools, another scenario would actually strengthen Mountain West. If most of the Big XII schools found homes in the SEC and the PAC-12 and Big XII collapsed, it’s possible that Mountain West could actually get stronger by being able to add 2-3 Big XII castaways like Iowa State or Kansas State. Combining these additions with some combination of additions from Conference USA (Houston, SMU, UTEP) and WAC (Utah State, UTSA), Mountain West could end up in a better position as a Superconference “Light.” While they would lack the firepower of PAC-12 or the SEC, they would have enough political clout and programs with over 50 years of Division 1-A experience to ensure they have some sort of seat at the table if the four superconferences of 16 teams he left them out.

On the off chance that the Mountain West is looted so severely by the survivors of the Big XII or the collapsing PAC-12, Hawaii may be reluctant to rejoin the WAC, although some programs like Wyoming would almost certainly be forced to leave. to do that. A more likely scenario would be to see them stay in the Big West for all other sports and seek independence from football. Hawaii would need to use its time zone advantage by signing some sort of deal with ESPN or Fox to be the last game every Saturday. There are college football addicts who want to keep watching football even if it’s 10:30 on the East Coast. An Alabama in Hawaii or even UNLV in Hawaii midseason game would certainly appeal to them.