Mountain West Conference

The Mountain West Conference (MW) is a collegiate athletic conference in the Western United States, participating in NCAA Division I. Its football teams compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). The MW officially began operations on January 4, 1999. Geographically, the MW covers a broad expanse of the Western United States, with member schools located in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Hawaii. Gloria Nevarez took over as commissioner of the MW on January 1, 2023, following the retirement of founding commissioner Craig Thompson.

The charter members of the MW included the United States Air Force Academy, Brigham Young University, Colorado State University, San Diego State University, the University of New Mexico, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, University of Utah and the University of Wyoming. Before forming the Mountain West Conference, all eight charter members had been members of the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) and half of these had been charter members of that conference from 1962.

The creation of the MW was a delayed aftereffect of the 1996 NCAA conference realignment, which had initially been triggered two years earlier when the Big Eight Conference agreed to merge with four members of the Southwest Conference (SWC) to create the Big 12 Conference, which would begin competition in the 1996–97 school year.

The Western Athletic Conference, which had initially announced plans to expand beyond its then-current 10 members to at least 12, ended up with even more potential expansion prospects. Ultimately, the WAC took in three of the four SWC schools left out of the Big 12 merger, Rice University, Southern Methodist University (SMU), and Texas Christian University (TCU). Three other schools were added to bring the total membership to 16, namely Big West Conference members San José State University and UNLV, plus the University of Tulsa, an NCAA football independent and otherwise a member of the Missouri Valley Conference. The WAC's 16 teams were divided into four four-team "quadrants", two of which rotated between the Mountain and Pacific Divisions every two years. However, the newly expanded WAC was soon wracked by tension between the established and new members.

In spring of 1998, BYU and Utah proposed a permanent split into two eight-team divisions. The proposal would have forced some schools into an unnatural alignment because of the geographic distribution of the conference. Air Force was the most strident opponent of this proposal, threatening to become an independent. Soon after the proposal by BYU and Utah, the presidents of Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, Utah, and Wyoming met at Denver International Airport to discuss their future, and they agreed to break away from the WAC to form a new conference. They invited the WAC members New Mexico, San Diego State, and UNLV to join them in what became the Mountain West Conference.

The next move for the MW came in 2005, when the conference added TCU, who had spent the previous four seasons in Conference USA (C-USA).

On June 11, 2010, Boise State University agreed to join the conference as its tenth member. On June 17, 2010, Utah announced it would be leaving the Mountain West to join what would become the Pac-12 Conference. On August 18, 2010, amidst rumors that BYU was considering leaving the Mountain West to go independent in football and rejoin the Western Athletic Conference in all other sports, the Mountain West Conference officially extended invitations to California State University, Fresno (Fresno State) and the University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada). Both schools accepted and would become the tenth and eleventh members of the league. BYU announced on August 31, 2010, that it would leave the Mountain West Conference and go Independent in football and become a member of the West Coast Conference (WCC) in other sports starting in 2011. On November 29, 2010, TCU announced all athletic teams would move to the Big East Conference effective in 2012. (Less than a year later, on October 10, 2011, TCU announced it would not join the Big East but would join the Big 12, home to fellow former SWC members Baylor, Texas, Texas Tech, and formerly Texas A&M, in 2012 instead.) On December 10, 2010, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa accepted a bid to become the 10th member of the conference for football only. These changes would leave the Mountain West Conference with 10 teams for the 2012 football season.

During the era of football's Bowl Championship Series (BCS), which was replaced by the College Football Playoff (CFP) in 2014, the MW champion qualified for a BCS bowl four times after the BCS formula was tweaked to allow teams from non-BCS conferences to play in BCS bowls if ranked in the top 12. However, two of the three schools that qualified are no longer with the conference.