Last Big Ten realignment: Impending
Last Pac-12 realignment: Impending
Last SEC realignment: Impending
Last Big 12 realignment: Impending
Last Conference USA realignment: Impending
Last AAC realignment: Impending
Last Sun Belt realignment: 2022
Last ACC realignment: 2013
Last Mountain West realignment: 2013
Last MAC realignment: 2005?
Ok, not really. From 2012 through 2015, UMass was part of the MAC. From 2007 through 2011, Temple was part of the MAC. From 2002 through 2004, UCF was part of the MAC. All of this was only in football. Marshall was part of the league from 1997-98 through 2004-05 in all sports, so 2005 is what we listed above. 2005 was the last time this particular FBS conference’s overall membership changed. Before that, it was a stretch across 1997 and 1998 which saw Buffalo join and NIU and Marshall rejoin the league. Before that, Akron joined in 1992. Before that, you have to go back to the ‘70s.
The MAC has been around since the 1940s. Six of its twelve members have been with the league since 1952, at the latest. Nine of the twelve have been with the league since 1973 at the latest. The other three joined in the 90s, and with a few brief dalliances here and there, the league has held steady while the Power Five has roiled (it was once the BCS six) and the Group of Five has roiled (the WAC was once an FBS conference) and the FCS has roiled with the lone exception of the American-ancient Ivy League. Constants in college football? Notre Dame’s an independent, the Ivies stick together, and the MAC is untouchable. Nobody has been poached from the MAC since Marshall. The MAC has poached nobody since inviting UMass up from the CAA.
Why is the MAC so steady? A big reason could be that nobody has gotten too good (Marshall finished ranked in the top 25 three times in a four-year stretch, including 10th once, while Miami’s 10th-place ranking was more of a one-hit wonder). Another, probably the bigger one (in part because it leads into the last one), is that these schools are really similar to one another. All twelve are public. All twelve have between 16,000 and 33,000 students; eight are between 16,000 and 20,000. With the exception of Buffalo, the entire league resides in a state bordering at least one other MAC state, and even with Buffalo, the drive to its furthest conference opponent (NIU) is just nine hours. Nine of the twelve campus are located in Ohio and Michigan. Three are directional Michigan universities. Six are regional Ohio institutions. The other three are regional Rust Belt schools themselves. It’s a tight pack, both competitively and culturally. To survive as a conference, you definitely need the latter. The former helps too.
The cry with conference realignment is that “it’s all about the money,” and money is, of course, the driving force. TV deals are what provoke conference changes, the same way lease timing impacts renters moving between cities or neighborhoods. But another driving factor is culture. To whom are Texas and Oklahoma more similar: Kansas State, or Georgia? To whom are USC and UCLA more similar: Washington State, or Michigan? Cheap travel made regionality matter less. Rapid communication has made regionality largely irrelevant. As athletic departments get richer and richer, they aren’t sending their teams by bus, and as internet and television media take more and more market share from newspapers, fans aren’t limited to following the teams in their time zone. Regionality is still part of the equation—it’s called the “Southeastern Conference,” after all, and that’s still largely an accurate name—but more and more, regionality is part of what drives cultural similarities which in turn drive conference affiliation, as opposed to regionality being the determining factor. In the MAC’s case, it just makes a lot of sense for these twelve schools to be aligned. There’s uniqueness between schools within the league—Buffalo’s big, Miami’s preppy, Ohio’s stoned off its ass, some schools are commuter schools and other schools aren’t—but by and large, they’re different flavors of the same university. A lot of that ties back to regionality, and regionality surely makes the conference’s continuing continuity more achievable. But overall, a lot of it’s the culture thing. All the way down to the fact that Miami, unlike Dayton, prioritizes football over basketball.
This is a long way of saying: Hey, look at the MAC. Nobody can shake that thing. But it’s also a good reminder that this isn’t just about each school grabbing itself the most money possible. If that were the case, Georgia and Michigan and USC and Notre Dame and Texas and Ohio State and LSU and Alabama would be playing a round robin every year.
