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News conferences set today to announce Aggies’ move
After a long, strange trip out West, New Mexico State football is circling back to the Sun Belt Conference.
The school has scheduled a 5:30 p.m. public news conference today at the Pan American Center Annex to announce its new conference affiliation, at least for football. The news conference will stream live at NMStateSports.com. The Sun Belt first is holding a news conference at 5 that will be piped into the Barbara Hubbard Room.
New Mexico State football will be orphaned for 2013, but will have a home in 2014.
“It’s a combination of both (relief and excitement),” New Mexico State athletic director McKinley Boston said Tuesday. “It’s been a challenging period, and to be bringing it to closure is a very good feeling.”
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ESPN.com reported Tuesday that NMSU and Idaho — the two holdover football schools from the Western Athletic Conference — will join the Sun Belt as football-only members in 2014. It also reported Appalachian State and Georgia Southern are joining the league in 2014 as all-sports members, then become football members in 2015, when they will have fully transitioned from Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) to Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) status.
By adding Appalachian State, Georgia Southern, Idaho and NMSU, the Sun Belt would grow to 12 football members. It could then divide and play a postseason league championship game.
Other football schools in the reconfigured Sun Belt will be Arkansas State, Georgia State, Louisiana-Lafayette, Louisiana-Monroe, South Alabama, Texas State, Troy and Western Kentucky.
The geography of it all requires New Mexico State to do an about-face and point east in terms of its focus and recruiting.
“Obviously coach (Doug) Martin is trying to figure it out himself,” Boston said. “We already had decided we were going into Texas more than California anyway.”
The Aggies have a history with the Sun Belt. They were in the conference from 2001-04, going a respectable 15-12 in league football play, before joining the Western Athletic Conference for all sports. At the time, it was considered a major upgrade.
But the WAC has disintegrated as a football league, and all of its football schools from the 2012 season, except for NMSU and Idaho, are bound for other conferences. Even the longtime WAC commissioner, Karl Benson, bailed from the WAC to run the Sun Belt.
New Mexico State’s plan for 2013-14 is to compete in the WAC in all other sports, but play football as an independent. For all the luster the WAC has lost by losing schools (Boise State, Hawaii, Nevada, Fresno State, Utah State), it has managed to retain automatic qualifying bids into respective NCAA tournament fields for other sports.
— This article appeared on page D1 of the Albuquerque Journal
-- Email the reporter at rharrison@abqjournal.com Call the reporter at 505-823-3907
