The Mountain West Conference (formally abbreviated MW since July 2011; informally MWC), popularly known as the Mountain West, is the youngest of the college athletic conferences affiliated with the NCAA’s Division I FBS (formerly I-A). The MW officially began operations in July 1999. Geographically, the MW covers a broad expanse of the western United States, with member institutions located in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming, and will expand back into Utah when Utah State University joins the conference in 2013. The conference introduced a new logo for the 2011 season to reflect the changes. Craig Thompson has served as Commissioner of the MW since its founding in 1999.
Charter members included Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, New Mexico, San Diego State, UNLV, Utah, and Wyoming. Before forming the Mountain West Conference, seven of the eight charter members had been longtime members of the Western Athletic Conference; half were WAC charter members at its formation in 1962 - UNLV had only joined the WAC in 1996.
Read more about Mountain West Conference: History, Sports, Bowl Games, Facilities, Elevation
Famous quotes containing the words mountain, west and/or conference:
“Tjaden: How do they start a war?
Albert: Well, one country offends another.
Tjaden: How could one country offend another? You mean there’s a mountain over in Germany gets mad at a field in France?”
—Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959)
“Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You become an addict.... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day’s tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one?”
—Jessamyn West (1902–1984)
“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)