Courtesy of the Fresno Bee
by Matt James
DENVER - Here's a fun fact: The Western Athletic Conference is the only college conference that is headquartered in a state where it doesn't have a school.
At one time, it had two here, Colorado State in Fort Collins and Air Force in Colorado Springs, but you know how that story ends.
The WAC can take a pounding, can't it? It's the Timex of college conferences.
There's a Disney cartoon where Goofy is completely overmatched against the Black Knight. You've seen it. As Goofy is about to be vanquished, he shrinks into the fetal position inside his body plate. So the Black Knight hammers away at it with a variety of weapons, one of which was a jackhammer, if memory can be trusted. The knight, of course, gets tired and sweaty and falls over exhausted as Goofy pokes his head out into the cheer-filled arena.
The WAC has that kind of resilience. Think about this: It was just eight years ago that the WAC was 16 schools. Eight schools decided to leave. Supposedly, the best eight at football. Put it this way, the eight that were left wanted to go with those eight.
You don't want to reward that kind of behavior with free publicity, but rumor has it those eight started the Mountain West Conference.
And here we are, eight seasons later and the WAC -- a conference that has been plundered, pillaged, jackhammered, stripped for parts and abandoned along an interstate in a Denver suburb -- is better than the conference that supposedly took its heart.
We are talking only about football, being that we are in a system where only football matters.
They say the Mountain West was better last season, top to bottom, but you have to squeeze hard to get satisfaction from knowing your worst are better than someone else's worst.
The WAC had two of the top eight Heisman finishers. It had a team in a BCS bowl. The WAC had the better record against the Mountain West, head-to-head, and that was with Fresno State taking a well-earned break from quality football.
The WAC had the team winning the Fiesta Bowl in a fashion that defied description. How spectacular is the Grand Canyon? Umm, well, you kinda need to see it yourself.
It was the WAC where football players propose to cheerleaders who say yes. It was the WAC on national morning shows in New York. It was the WAC winning two ESPYs this week and getting to bask in the whole thing again.
This is the part where Karl Benson, the WAC commissioner, should be screaming, "IN YOUR FACE, TRAITORS!" but he isn't.
"I think to a lot of people's surprise," he says, "the WAC has not only survived, it has prospered."
Benson took a lot of the blame for the WAC splitting in the first place, so he should get a lot of the credit for keeping it alive. The Southwest Conference had its best half go to the Big Eight, and no one rebuilt it.
In a five-year period, the WAC was Dear-Johned by Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, New Mexico, Rice, San Diego State, SMU, TCU, Tulsa, UNLV, Utah, UTEP and Wyoming. It takes determination to get rejected by that many average-looking women and still keep going to nightclubs.
Benson credits Hawaii and Fresno State, "the two schools that got snubbed," by the Mountain West, and specifically Fresno State president John Welty, for the WAC enduring.
"I know John Welty is now under a lot of fire, but if you look back to 1998, he is the only president that is still there," Benson says. "I think he challenged his colleagues to be successful. And Fresno State was the school that other WAC schools looked to to build their programs after.
(The only two prominent pieces of "art" in the WAC office are framed, oversized copies of the Sports Illustrated with David Carr and Fresno State on the cover, and the USA Today story of this year's Fiesta Bowl.)
"I think there was a little of that competitiveness from our schools that they weren't going to be left behind."
If you were going to get left, Denver isn't a bad place for it. Benson's office is on the third floor of a building next to I-25. Two of his walls are mostly windows and the scenery hits the eyes in this order: city, foothills, mountains, more mountains, then snow-capped mountains.
"I wish I got to enjoy it more," he says. "I'll tell you when it's spectacular. In the winter. When the sun comes up in the east and it shines on the mountains and snow."
When Benson took the job in 1994, he had the same vision most coaches have, plumping up his résumé and getting to a BCS conference. Instead, after this season, he will have been WAC commissioner for longer than anyone in history.
"Just like WAC coaches are looking to move up," Benson says. "I may have been thinking that I was going to move up the food chain. There was some damage done because of the WAC breakup. I was obviously an easy target when people would ask the question, 'How could this happen?' "
But isn't it the school presidents who make decisions?
He laughs and ducks the question.
"There was some career damage done there, but I think I've overcome it."
Through everything, Denver has been the only home of the WAC, except for two years when the original commissioner, Paul Brechler, moved it to Phoenix because of his health problems. After the split, San Jose and Dallas were considered; one a little too expensive, the other a little too Texas. Some say moving to Dallas might have kept the Texas schools from leaving for Conference USA.
Yet somehow, through all the changes, Denver still works for the WAC. It's centrally located. It isn't near any school, so it's easy to appear unbiased. It's a direct flight to every school but one, and let's face it, about the only direct flight to Louisiana Tech would be a catapult at the city limits.
"I'm very happy with where I am," says the 55-year-old Benson when you mention the Big 12 has an opening for a commissioner. "You never say never, but I'm certainly not pursuing it.
"If I ended my career as the commissioner of the WAC, I certainly wouldn't be questioning my career decisions."
With a view like this, how could he?