In December 2010, Hawaii finally received an offer to become a football-only member of the Mountain West Conference and later received conference membership for all other sports in the Big West Conference. This gave Hawaii the ability to follow other members of the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) all the way to the Mountain West (Boise State, Fresno State, and Nevada). While the WAC was reeling on life support, Mountain West was a huge boost to the program by bringing the Warriors together with traditional foes like Wyoming, San Diego State and the Air Force. While BYU, Utah, and TCU were gone, the remaining schools were unlikely to go anywhere.
But the superconferences threaten to upset this new stability. By leaving the Big XII for a potential SEC invite, Texas A&M once again set a potential domino effect in motion. In a worst-case scenario, Oklahoma and other schools could leave the Big XII and the remaining schools, such as Kansas State, Baylor and Iowa State, could keep the Big XII shell intact while selectively choosing a portion of the Mountain West schools to join. . While schools like Boise State and Colorado State could be targeted in this scenario, Hawaii certainly would not. Since PAC-12 is unlikely to go after Mountain West schools, another scenario would actually strengthen Mountain West. If most of the Big XII schools found homes in the SEC and the PAC-12 and Big XII collapsed, it’s possible that Mountain West could actually get stronger by being able to add 2-3 Big XII dropouts like Iowa State or Kansas State. Combining these additions with some combination of Conference USA (Houston, SMU, UTEP) and WAC (Utah State, UTSA) additions, Mountain West could finish in a better position as Superconference “Light.” While they would lack the firepower of the PAC-12 or the SEC, they would have enough political clout and programs with more than 50 years of experience in Division 1-A to ensure they would have some sort of seat at the table if all four superconferences of 16 teams left them out.
On the off chance that the Mountain West is looted so severely by Big XII survivors or PAC-12 collapses, Hawaii may be reluctant to rejoin the WAC, though some programs like Wyoming would almost certainly be forced to. to do that. A more likely scenario would see them stay in the Big West for all other sports and seek independence from football. Hawaii would need to use its time zone to its advantage by signing some sort of deal with ESPN or Fox to be the last game every Saturday. There are college football addicts who want to keep watching football even though it’s 10:30 on the East Coast. A midseason game from Alabama to Hawaii or even UNLV to Hawaii would certainly appeal to them.