SMQ: Why Boise State football to AAC would be bad deal for both parties

As talk heats up about a breakup between Boise State football and the Mountain West, we look at why moving to the AAC would backfire.

During the last seismic shift in college football conference realignment, we almost witnessed the development of a truly nationwide conference. As the Big East was rebranding to become the American Athletic Conference, it made a bold move to court Boise State and San Diego State. Both the Broncos and the Aztecs initially signaled their intent to move, before backing out of the realignment and remaining in the Mountain West.

Now it appears that Boise State is one again disillusioned with their current situation and talk is swirling around the sport about the possibility of a reunion with the AAC.

In terms of pure competition, the move would be a boon for the Broncos. The AAC has been consistently at the top of the Group of Five standings, with more depth of talent throughout its ranks. Last season, the league produced five teams that won at least 10 games — amounting to nearly half the membership of the 12-team AAC.

Boise State could certainly benefit from that perennial boost to its schedule strength. After reaching the New Year’s Six in the inaugural season of the College Football Playoff in 2014, the Broncos have been in the hunt but always struggle to overcome a loss or two in the regular season. As we saw with Memphis in 2019, one loss in no way dooms a team from the AAC to also-ran status.

Wait a minute… wasn’t this column arguing that realignment to the AAC would be a bad thing for Boise State?

If you only think about who Boise State would get to play if they were to move to the AAC in football, it can be really easy to miss the broader impacts of such a shift. There is a reason why this game of musical chairs called realignment is not something that happens casually or with annual frequency.

We have seen conferences overextend themselves before with growth. In 1996, the death of the Southwest Conference left multiple teams out in the cold. The Western Athletic Conference used this as an opportunity to balloon from 10 teams to 16 teams, as they brought Rice, TCU, and SMU into the fold and added San Jose State and UNLV from the Big West along with independent Tulsa.

Stretched across four time zones (including Hawaii), the WAC hoped that this growth would be its saving grace in a college football landscape that put increasing power in conferences’ hands after the 1984 Supreme Court case removed television negotiating rights from the NCAA’s purview and decentralized negotiating power into the hands of individual leagues and teams.

Instead, unable to court enough TV dollars to make the geographically unwieldy circuit financially viable, the supercharged WAC lasted only three seasons before half of its membership peeled off to form the Mountain West.

With its continued courting of Boise State, BYU, San Diego State, and other western teams, the AAC is doing its best to turn itself into a truly American conference from coast to coast. That only serves to create a more nebulous brand for a league that relies heavily on calling itself a “Power Six” conference. That inclination to group one’s members in with the big boys of college football makes sense, even if it requires an awkward and unnatural lack of any regional identity to get there.

Expanding beyond one’s regional brand is always a dangerous precedent, even for a Power Five league. We saw this happen with the Big 12, which brought in West Virginia as a replacement for the talent drain that occurred earlier in the 2010s. The Mountaineers made little geographic sense, given how disjointed geographically Morgantown is from the rest of the schools in the conference. It was a marriage of convenience rather than logic, with West Virginia looking to bolt an imploding Big East and the Big 12 looking to shore up its membership numbers.

Even for a league that distributes more than $40 million annually to each member school, the increased travel and attendant expenses that come with such travel can be a drag on the bottom line. The AAC footprint already expands far beyond the Big 12, and a threefold increase in distribution to more than $7 million per year will not mitigate the impact of the increased mileage that would inevitably occur with the addition of Boise State.

Unless a team is moving into Power Five territory, realignment has questionable value for a program.

Upward mobility in college football is always the long-term goal. For Utah and TCU, two teams that were effectively Boise State’s equal during the bulk of the BCS era, moving up to a power conference was always the end goal. Boise State hoped for a similar fate, but neither the Pac-12 nor the Big 12 — the two conferences that line up most logically from a geographic standpoint as new potential homes for the Broncos — has deigned to call up the team in Idaho’s capital city.

From a purely competitive standpoint, Boise State could develop quickly into a solid program for either league. Because intercollegiate athletics are wedded to institutions of higher learning, however, affiliations entail more than merely meeting the competitive culture of a given league. What has held the Broncos back in realignment is not its athletic ability but the standing of its academic programs.

This is what also doomed BYU to independence when the Cougars opted to leave the Mountain West.

For the American Athletic Conference, the benefits of bringing in Boise State would be mitigated by the travel schedule not just for the Broncos but for every AAC team. Replacing UConn with the Broncos would add thousands of miles of travel to every team that drew a trip to the Smurf Turf in a given year. Tulsa, the closest school to Boise State, is still nearly 1200 miles away from Albertsons Stadium.

The quickest way to burn through an increased media rights distribution is to increase expense burdens on member programs. For the AAC, adding Boise State would bring another big-name program into the fold without any attendant increase in rights. Even if ESPN were willing to step up and renegotiate a higher dollar value with the addition of another sterling brand, the gap between the AAC and Power Five leagues would not close substantively enough to make it worthwhile.

Travel in the Mountain West is no simple matter, with schools separated by wide swaths of distance. To put this in perspective, let’s look at Boise State’s 2019 conference schedule against what their travel might look like in the AAC.

Eliminating non-conference games, Boise State traveled 4,486 miles in 2019 for nine conference showdowns. Imagining what travel might look like for the Broncos in the AAC, we evaluated what it would look like if Boise State played the same schedule in conference that Memphis did last year. Playing one fewer conference game in the AAC than they do in the Mountain West, the Broncos would still travel 13,890 miles with the Tigers’ schedule — more than three times as far as they must travel in the MWC.

The economic incentive to join the AAC is lacking, and there is no guarantee that it would yield any greater chance at reaching the New Year’s Six.

Ultimately the dollars and cents just don’t line up for Boise State to hitch its fortunes up to the AAC wagon. While the conference is certainly in far better financial shape than any other Group of Five league, a shift away from the Mountain West would put undue burdens on Boise State’s program as well as every AAC team that would make the trek to Albertsons Stadium for away games.

In a media landscape that prizes brand names, Boise State is one of the most recognizable programs in the entire country. The advantages of bringing in the Broncos, though, would be far outweighed by the burdens of inviting them into the fold.

Caveat emptor, AAC… and caveat venditor to the Broncos.