As the rest of the country waits for the chip to fall that is Brigham Young U. — whether the university will stick with the Mountain West Conference or choose to move elsewhere and possibly go independent — Director of Athletics Ross Bjork said Western is waiting along with everyone else.
The BYU athletic department has until Sept. 1 to sign on and stay in the Mountain West, according to multiple reports.
“Just wait to see what happens with BYU,” Bjork told the Herald Tuesday. “That’s the next trigger.”
And it’s that trigger which could pull Western Kentucky U. in various potential directions.
The New York Daily News reported Tuesday that BYU is likely to go independent in football and join the Western Athletic Conference in all other sports. The report says BYU won’t officially announce the move until Sept. 1.
Speculation aims that Conference USA could potentially be raided by west coast conferences looking to replace lost members. Then in turn, Conference USA could potentially recruit new member teams from the Sun Belt.
Bjork said right now there’s no official discussions with other conferences because when it comes time to make a decision, there’s no way to tell what a potential conference will look like.
“Right now there’s no invite (to another conference). There’s no dialogue. There’s no discussion,” Bjork said. “What we’re trying to do is what’s best for WKU. If that means we add teams into the Sun Belt, if that means the Sun Belt is repositioned in some reconfiguration, if that means we go to another conference — whatever the dynamics might be, we have to do what’s best for us.”
President Gary Ransdell insisted that no matter the outcome, Western officials won’t be surprised by the ripple effect.
“We’re studying all the scenarios,” Ransdell said. “We’re tracking all of it, and we’ll do what’s best for our conference and WKU. Whether those are aligned, we’ll wait and see.”
Western, which entered the Sun Belt in 1982 following more than 30 years in the Ohio Valley Conference, has won 72 Sun Belt Conference championships over the last 10 years — 32 more than any other league member. The school’s 26 championships in the last three years are more than any university in Division I.
Ransdell said it’s most important that any conference switch would place Western in a league that’s expanding to get better rather than expanding to survive.
“It’s impossible to predict — if an invitation should come — is that conference trying to survive or are they trying to get better?” Ransdell said. “We don’t want to be part of a survival plan. We want to be part of a get-better plan. That may be in our own conference, and it may be somewhere else. But a lot of dominoes have to fall.”
Bjork said all Western can do right now is strengthen the current Sun Belt Conference while at the same time boosting its football program.
The first-year athletic director compared Western’s place in conference realignment to a job interview — something he’s familiar with after being hired last March.
“Unless you do great in your current position, you’re not going to be popular for the next job,” Bjork said. “It’s the same for our case. We need to be as good as possible in the Sun Belt in order to be positioned for the future.”