San Diego State’s deep run plays directly into the conference realignment

HOUSTON — Whether or not John David Wicker, the San Diego State athletics director, owns many leather-bound books or an apartment that smells of rich mahogany, he could be pardoned for channeling his inner Ron Burgundy .

With its men’s basketball team in the national championship game, losing to Connecticut on Monday night, and with two major conferences considering the Aztecs as a potential addition, San Diego State is indeed quite a big deal.

“People have heard of us,” Wicker said on Saturday night, before the Aztecs won a thriller over Florida Atlantic on Lamont Butler Jr.’s jumper. at the buzzer to continue to the title game. “But now they know who we are.”

The state of San Diego has been quietly proficient in men’s basketball and soccer for over a decade. They have won at least 20 basketball games each season, all but one from 2005-06. (They dropped to 19-14 in 2016-17.) And their football team has gone to 12 consecutive bowls — not including the 2020 season cut short by the coronavirus pandemic.

Their moment, after this groundbreaking NCAA tournament, is largely due to the world changing around them.

When the Chargers moved from San Diego to Los Angeles in 2017, it left a void in the city that the Aztecs’ basketball and football teams have eagerly filled. And when Southern California and UCLA announced last June that they would scrap the Pac-12 conference for the Big Ten, it opened up a new track for San Diego State.

Suddenly, with its next television rights deal up for negotiation, the Pac-12 needed a foothold in Southern California, and the two schools the Aztecs were unlikely to admit were no longer part of the equation.

And if the Pac-12 isn’t interested, the Big 12 Conference is – Commissioner Brett Yormark repeatedly expressed a desire to have a school in every time zone. Yormark attended Saturday night’s game and sat about a dozen rows up, facing the San Diego State bench, with a good view of Butler’s game-winning shot.

Of course, conference rescheduling is rarely driven by anything other than money.

And it’s hard to say that many of these decisions have played out anywhere other than on the balance sheet.

Nebraska football has become a punchline since moving from the Big 12 to the Big Ten in 2011. Maryland’s rich basketball history is not as valued in the Big Ten as it is in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Missouri has a similar story to tell since moving to the Southeastern Conference away from its historic partners in the Big 12. And neither Maryland nor Missouri has been more than an afterthought in football.

Yes, Rutgers’ coffers are fuller — but so is the athletic department’s deficit, as its football program has slipped from competitive in the Big East to irrelevant in the Big Ten, having played no more than one conference game five in the past eight seasons. times won. (The Rutgers men’s basketball team’s ascent is an exception.)

Soon, similar questions could be asked about whether the money-grabbing of Texas and Oklahoma — fleeing the Big 12 from the SEC — and Los Angeles schools were more myopic than smart. A path to the football playoffs, even with the 2024 expansion, looks significantly more challenging for all four schools.

And when San Diego State flew to Orlando, Fla., for the first weekend of the men’s basketball tournament, halfway through the six-hour flight, administrators and coaches began to consider what the Los Angeles schools had in store.

“Even though it was a charter, I thought, my goodness, those guys have to do this every other week to play a basketball game?” San Diego state coach Brian Dutcher said. “It would be exhausting.”

He added, “I wish them all the best, but that’s more travel than I could ever wish for anyone.”

What’s notable about all of these moves is that they’re lateral — hopping from one of the so-called power conferences (Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Pac-12, Big 12, and the dissolution of the Big East for football) to bigger television deals.

The state of San Diego is looking at another model: climbing the ladder.

That has been rare for decades. But the Big 12, after losing to Oklahoma and Texas, adds Brigham Young, Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston. BYU has a nationwide fan base associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the other three schools have been contenders at the national football or men’s basketball championships for the past six years.

However, the state of San Diego is studying a rare conference realignment success story in Utah, which moved from the Mountain West Conference to the Pac-12 in 2011. Utah had already begun preparations for a move by investing in athletics and polishing the university’s academic profile. so that when television rights were negotiated, the Utes were an attractive candidate for expansion.

“That’s the road map,” Wicker said.

In recent years, the state of San Diego has aggressively applied for research grants, built a new science and engineering complex, offered scholarships to the state’s top students, and improved graduation rates in an effort to clean up its well-earned reputation as a party school.

The basketball program has been the second best on the West Coast after Gonzaga for the past two decades and draws boisterous crowds at the 12,000-seat Viejas Arena. The football program now boasts the posh 35,000-seat Snapdragon Stadium, which opened last August. The stadium is located a few miles from campus on the site of the old Jack Murphy Stadium, where the Chargers and Padres played for decades.

Funding for the stadium, part of a $3.5 billion, 135-acre redevelopment project that will take place over the next ten years, was green-lit in March 2020 just days after the pandemic.

At the time, if there were questions about the wisdom of investing in college football, moving forward on several fronts proved to be a boon, Wicker said. When loan rates plummeted, the school was able to borrow money for the $310 million stadium at 2.78 percent interest, which it said would save about $2 million annually in interest payments. Also, the project’s contractor procured construction materials immediately before supply chains became clogged.

“In the end, Covid helped us,” said Wicker. “If we had waited six months, I don’t know if we would have built the stadium. It would have been much more expensive.”

After Monday, however, the Aztecs are waiting.

The Pac-12 presidents will meet later this month and will discuss where the ongoing media contract negotiations stand. Commissioner George Kliavkoff, who did not attend the Final Four, has said expansion talks are likely to follow a media rights deal.

“We now have a national perception,” Dutcher said. “I think everyone in the West has always known we’ve been good. But now that we’re playing on the biggest stage and we’re winning on the biggest stage, I think just like when Gonzaga made that move, they did it on a national stage. And that’s how they won their respect.”

It’s not a bad position for the state of San Diego: going to conferences with a hat in one hand and a silver medal in the other.