If the golden rule is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” conference re-alignment has the NCAA scrambling to do and undo everywhere.
After getting poached to shreds by other conferences, the Pac-12 is poaching Colorado State, San Diego State, Fresno State and Boise State from the Mountain West, the league announced Thursday. They’ll join the conference in 2026, leaving the Mountain West just as Stanford, Cal and others left the Pac-12.
Spartans athletic director Jeff Konya said the Mountain West “continues to be one of the top FBS conferences in the country.”
“We have great leadership within the Mountain West and SJSU is a proud member of the conference,” Konya said in a statement to this news organization.
Yet the conference realignment news is certainly troublesome for San Jose State and the other programs remaining in the Mountain West.
Without four of the Mountain West’s premier teams, the Spartans will be left in a similar spot as the Pac-12: bumping up against the minimum amount of schools required to maintain FBS status. With the announcement, eight schools remain in the conference— SJSU, UNLV, Air Force, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah State, Wyoming and Hawaii remain. The Pac-12 is two members shy of FBS status and the Mountain West would dip below the threshold with any further departures.
The Spartans are clearly in a less stable position today than they were yesterday.
Responding to an inquiry about whether San Jose State would be interested in joining the Pac-12 or any other conference outside of the Mountain West, Konya didn’t directly answer.
“We are focused on providing a cutting-edge experience for our student-athletes in the classroom, in competition and in the community,” Konya said via email. “The success we have had over the last few years has been unprecedented with our most points scored in the Directors’ Cup standings which measures all sports performances in the NCAA postseason, winning a national championship in community service, earning the prestigious NACDA Community Service Award, presented by the Fiesta Bowl, and football making bowl games in three of the last four years, including two straight. All of these accomplishments have SJSU positioned to be successful in the future.”
If the Spartans were to seek a new conference, they may not be high on the wish lists of other leagues. The criteria athletic conferences have used to identify possible schools in conference realignment include media value, geographic fit, academic reputation and competitive success — particularly in revenue-generating sports.
Although the Spartans have made three Bowl games in the past four years, they historically don’t have a strong football program. First-year head coach Ken Niumatalolo has the Spartans off to a 2-0 start, but the highest they’ve been ranked in the AP Poll this century is 19. The men’s basketball program is even more dire, having last made the NCAA Tournament in 1996.
The Spartans are in a top-10 U.S. media market, but the crowded sports scene in the Bay Area — including two bigger college sports departments in Stanford and Cal — hurts their attendance and television ratings appeal. In 2023, the Spartans’ football attendance average was third-lowest in the conference, per D1Ticker.
San Jose’s options are to stay in the Mountain West, which could essentially dissolve in 2026, become an Independent football program (unaffiliated with any specific conference like Notre Dame), find a different conference to welcome them in or downshift into the lower-level Football Championship Subdivision.
Each path has pitfalls.
With the Mountain West crumbling around SJSU, its standing in the NCAA looks to weaken. Conferences gain strength in numbers, and the league is trending in the wrong direction there. Even if it adds schools for 2026 and beyond, those schools would likely have similar issues as the ones currently in the league and could complicate the conference’s geography.
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Becoming Independent would probably be logistically untenable. The only schools unaffiliated with any specific conference for football are Notre Dame, Connecticut and UMass — which is joining the MAC next year. Independent schools don’t generate revenue from their share of conference media rights deals and, although they’re College Football Playoff-eligible, they lose access to bowl games associated with conference results.
Downshifting from the FBS to the FCS could make sense competitively and has precedent. When the Sun Belt declined to keep Idaho as a conference member, it reclassified as an FCS team. But FCS teams have far fewer scholarships to dole out and players recruited to play for SJSU would likely hit the transfer portal in droves.
Conferences similar to the Mountain West that have some geographic relevance to San Jose include the Big Sky (an FCS conference that includes Cal Poly, UC Davis, Sacramento State and Idaho), the West Coast Conference (which doesn’t have football), the Western Athletic Conference (a low-major conference that recently reinstated football) and, of course, the Pac-12.
Given all those options, staying in the Mountain West appears to be the most likely outcome, at least for the foreseeable future. San Jose State is, as Konya said, a proud member. But staying in the Mountain West requires the conference to continue operating, and if the past few years of NCAA realignment is a lesson, there are more dominos still to fall.
“Conference realignment continues to be at the forefront of intercollegiate athletics, and The Mountain West is not immune to this,” Konya said. “Our brand has never been stronger, and we look forward to positioning our athletics department in the best possible way in the future.”