Mountain West basketball is worthy of your attention -- and joy
The supposedly mid-major league could get as many as six teams in the NCAA Tournament this year. It's enough to make even a callused college basketball fan find love again
It all started on a whim.
On the night after New Year’s Day, and with our nine-month-old son fast asleep upstairs, my wife and I came across a Colorado State-New Mexico men’s basketball game on television. The Rams were a top-15 team at the time, the Lobos were making a case to be ranked and as Louisville natives, we’re genetically predisposed to stop on any channel on which there’s someone with the last name ‘Pitino’ coaching.
Sometime around the final media timeout of the first half, the thought occurred to us – how about making the 70-minute trip up I-25 to Fort Collins to catch a game?
So, early last week, we did.
There was some intentionality to the matchup we selected – star guard Isaiah Stevens and Colorado State against defending national runner-up San Diego State was awfully appealing on paper – and it lived up to whatever expectations we had.
The Rams got off to a fast start, scoring 13 of the game’s first 15 points, the Aztecs rallied from a double-digit deficit in the second half to take a one-point lead with 7:29 remaining and the Rams, buoyed by a boisterous home crowd, recovered late to pull away for a 79-71 victory in a meeting of two teams just outside the top 25 of the major national polls.
Riveting as it was, the game was only part of the night’s appeal.
Moby Arena, Colorado’s State’s loud and charming 8,093-seat on-campus arena, was sold out. We had inadvertently bought seats a few rows behind the San Diego State bench, giving us an intimate look at the confluence of two fan bases who desperately wanted drastically different outcomes from the game – whether it was the family member of an Aztecs player reaming out the nearest official at every timeout or the San Diego State fan in a 1990s-era Padres hat whose goal seemed to be to troll anyone wearing green or gold within a 127-foot radius of him.
As we walked out of the arena into the crisp night at the foot of Colorado’s Front Range, I couldn’t stop talking about what an unbelievable experience it was.
Really, though, I was lying to myself. For Mountain West basketball and what it has become the past several years, it was just a Tuesday.
How the Mountain West has scaled the mountain
The 2023-24 men’s basketball season has the potential to be a significant one for the Mountain West.
The 11-team conference is currently projected by some outlets to receive as many as six bids to the NCAA Tournament. The week we ventured to Fort Collins, two Mountain West teams were ranked in the top 25, with another three receiving votes for the poll. After this past weekend’s games, it had six teams ranked in the top 55 of KenPom.com, one more than the Pac-12 and two more than the ACC. The NCAA’s NET rankings, probably the most important metric in determining the NCAA Tournament field, had five Mountain West teams in its top 35, more than any other conference except the Big 12.
Indeed, a number of programs in the conference are enjoying outstanding, even transformative seasons. Under first-year head coach Danny Sprinkle, Utah State won 19 of its first 21 games and cracked the top 20. New Mexico, one of the league’s stronger programs historically, has pulled itself out of a decade-long slog to join Utah State in the top 20. San Diego State, fresh off its Final Four run, is once again in the thick of the conference title race. Boise State is all but guaranteed to notch its third-consecutive season with more than 20 wins. After a disappointing 15-18 finish in 2022-23, Colorado State is virtually assured of its fourth 20-win season of the past five years under coach Niko Medved.
While the Mountain West is approaching what could be its zenith, it’s been a strong conference for quite some time.
Formed in 1998 after eight schools broke away from the unwieldy and untenable 16-team Western Athletic Conference, the league, like many of its peers, has had a fluid membership, with future Power Five enlistees Utah, TCU and BYU once part of its lineup before bouncing.
Even after those staggered departures, the Mountain West maintains a group of teams with strong tradition. UNLV has a national championship and four Final Fours to its name. Wyoming has a national title, too, though you have to go back to 1943 to find it. San Diego State has improbably morphed into a national power. New Mexico has enjoyed spurts of success. Over the past 60 years, eight of the conference’s 11 members have made at least one Sweet 16. In each of the past two seasons, it has gotten four teams into the NCAA Tournament field, with its eight total bids putting it above the Pac-12 and just two behind the ACC. It’s a sizable step up from where it had been the previous seven seasons, when it got more than two teams into the 68-team field just once.
What’s behind this resurgence?
For one, many of the conference’s programs have made savvy coaching hires, providing the league with a nice mix of up-and-comers like Medved and Sprinkle, coaches fired from power-conference programs like Pitino, Nevada’s Steve Alford and San Jose State’s Tim Miles who are excelling with a change of scenery, and coaches in their 60s like Brian Dutcher at San Diego State and Leon Rice who, for age or some other reason, haven’t been poached by supposedly bigger programs.
Though there are examples of four-year players like Stevens who have thrived at a single school, the Mountain West has benefitted from an influx of transfers, often coming over from more prestigious programs and often either looking to stay in the western half of the country or move back closer to wherever home is in it.
The top four scorers in the league as of this past weekend were all transfers. Each of the four teams tied atop the conference standings has at least one transfer among its top three scorers. It’s perhaps best embodied by New Mexico, with transfers accounting for three of its top five scorers. In an interesting twist, Lobos leading scorer Jamal Mashburn Jr. is the son of the former NBA all-star of the same name who played for Pitino’s father, Rick, at Kentucky in the early 1990s while starting center and No. 5 scorer Nelly Junior Joseph also played for the elder Pitino – but at Iona 30 years after Pitino coached the father of his future teammate. College basketball’s weird and fun like that sometimes.
Most quantifiably, the league and its members have effectively employed a wise non-conference scheduling strategy. Mountain West teams are caught in the awkward middle of college basketball. Getting power-conference teams to accept road games and risk getting upset is a tall, nearly impossible ask. Conversely, beating up almost exclusively on small opponents there to collect a check wouldn’t do much to improve the quality of the league.
Instead, they’ve arranged home-and-home series with strong programs from similarly positioned leagues and entered as many multi-team events as they could so they could get shots at some of the sport’s big boys on a neutral floor rather than on the road.
“Our coaches really have a high level of understanding of where their teams are going to be and how to schedule,” Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez told The Athletic. “Our goal is to be above a 70-to-75 winning percentage coming out of the noncon, with good wins. So that when you do stub your toe, those losses aren’t going to drop you too far in the NET rankings.”
It worked. The league won 73.2% of its non-conference games this year, the fourth-best mark of the 32 conferences. It’s the only league in which every team finished out-of-league play with a winning record.
In many ways, though, this is what the schools and their programs were built to be. It’s not worth asking how Mountain West basketball got here because it kind of always has been here, or at least capable of doing so.
For one, many of the universities in the Mountain West are quite large. All but two of the 11 members have undergraduate enrollments of at least 11,000 and five have at least 18,000. That latter figure is particularly notable. Though they lack some of the athletic name recognition, those five schools – San Diego State, San Jose State, Colorado State, UNLV and Fresno State – are larger than the following Power Five schools: Oregon, West Virginia, Virginia, Oklahoma, Georgia Tech, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma State, Ole Miss, Kansas State and Mississippi State.
In many instances, those sizable enrollments give the schools a reliable source of fan support, whether it’s from active students or alums who live relatively close by and can come in for games.
Even beyond campus, there is built-in, generations-deep loyalty to a number of these schools. At least four of the Mountain West’s members – Wyoming, Boise State, Nevada and New Mexico – have strong claims of being THE school and athletic program in their state. Others are in smaller towns where the college and its teams are the big draw. In a larger market like San Diego, which inexplicably only has one major professional sports franchise right now, San Diego State can fill that void.
That passion translates to some raucous in-arena atmospheres. Last season, New Mexico was 15th in total attendance in Division I, putting it ahead of programs like Virginia, Louisville, Michigan State, Michigan and Ohio State. This season, three Mountain West programs – San Diego State, New Mexico and Boise State – are averaging at least 10,000 fans per game.
In the eastern time zone, where nearly half the country lives, anything west of Dallas is often thought of as an amorphous blob. Since moving out to Denver in 2022, I’ve often been asked by friends back east what it’s like living on the west coast even though Cincinnati’s a shorter drive from my house than San Francisco.
Because of that, the schools and their sports teams that inhabit that region can often be discounted and overlooked if they don’t carry a certain conference affiliation.
That perception of the league can continue to improve with more postseason success. In 2022, four Mountain West teams made the NCAA Tournament, but all bowed out in the first round. Even with San Diego State’s heroics last year, the Aztecs’ three conference compatriots were all knocked out in the first round.
Beyond that, though, it could be uniquely positioned to excel in the age of increased player movement and roster fluidity. The Mountain West has a large-yet-geographically-sensible footprint that encompasses several major cities teeming with talented basketball players. If they’re looking to stay close to home and play teams in that area – or if they’re looking to transfer back to a more familiar part of the country – the Mountain West and West Coast Conference could be the beneficiaries as four major west coast schools head to a league with no other members west of Nebraska and while Arizona and Arizona State join a geographic monstrosity of a conference stretching from West Virginia to Phoenix.
All of this is to say that this season, depending on how it finishes out, may be more of a next step than a final one in the league’s rise.
Why the Mountain West’s success, and college basketball in general, is worth savoring
Part of my affinity for the Mountain West is unmistakably personal.
My college basketball education and fandom was rooted largely in Conference USA – not the bastardized version today that has been withered away by round after round of conference realignment, but one that included the likes of Cincinnati, Louisville, Marquette, Memphis and DePaul back when DePaul – I promise you, with God as my witness – was good.
Hidden away in this mid-major league in the late 1990s and early 2000s were these proud programs, some of which played in NBA-sized arenas crowded with fans from a community in which college basketball mattered in a way that was truly foundational to life there. Based on its generic, seemingly AI-generated name, it could be easily dismissed as lesser-than by fans of conferences loaded with schools with a fraction of the following and passion, but in some ways, that only made it more fun, like you were part of some cool, pseudo-secret club (or at least that’s how my prepubescent brain processed it).
In the Mountain West, I see a little bit of that, or at least I did in my limited exposure to one of its venues and two of its teams last week.
There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about Moby Arena other than that it’s a building designed primarily to be a fun place to watch basketball that, when anywhere close to full, has the potential to get extremely loud. Colorado State and San Diego State may well unravel early in the NCAA Tournament as so many other Mountain West teams have in recent years, but on this night, as they have been for so much of the season, they played with an intensity and crispness that was reflected back into the crowd they played in front of.
As I sat there watching, I felt something I admittedly hadn’t in some time while taking in a live college basketball game – unbridled happiness.
As age does to most of us, the sport doesn’t mean what it did to me when I was much younger. With an infant son, I’ve watched less of it this season than I have at any other point in my cognizant life.
I would often get asked when I left my job at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette why I gave up a beat I had for six years to move halfway across the country. Truthfully, at least part of it was because I was burnt out – not physically, but mentally and emotionally. For the better part of a decade, much of the joy I felt for the sport was gradually sapped from me.
It’s a problem of the privileged. Having minor qualms about your job that pays you to write about your favorite sport is hardly what any rational person would consider a serious issue, particularly in a ransacked media ecosystem in which such opportunities are in depressingly short supply.
Still, I felt it. A close, competitive game in a jam-packed arena wasn’t something worth savoring, but a reason to stress that much more over a deadline. The Pitt teams I covered lost far more often than they won, meaning I got to closely watch whatever enthusiasm and hope that once existed in the faces of players drain after each setback until it disappeared altogether. More often than not, I saw the pain the sport brought rather than the elation is created. I got along with the coaches I covered, but when tasked with accurately analyzing a struggling team, you’re going to rub some folks the wrong way and sometimes dent what could have been professionally beneficial relationships.
Inside that gym last Tuesday, as Colorado State pulled away in the final minutes and brought its home crowd to its feet, I suddenly felt some of what I had lost, almost like I was back with my dad in our Kentucky living room watching every Louisville game we could as a way to get through another dreary winter.
As the cheers started to fade and people sat back in their seats, I looked over at my son in my wife’s lap. It was two hours past his normal bed time, but his eyes were improbably still wide open, soaking in whatever they could – the band, the fans around us, the scoreboard, the light-up ram structure in the arena’s east end zone and, every now and then, even the players on the court.
He won’t remember this moment. Years later, we can show him pictures and trinkets from the night, but it would simply be digging away at the earth when there’s nothing resting beneath it to uncover.
For me, college basketball was a connection point and a ritual with my dad. Unlike a lot of my sports journalism comrades, my obsession with sports wasn’t passed down to me. My father’s supposedly a Bears fan, but as recently as 2018, he thought Lovie Smith – who had been fired six years earlier – was still the team’s coach. But he loved Louisville basketball and because of that, I did, too.
There’s little, if any, chance that college basketball will ever mean to my son what it did and still does to me. In a city with four major professional teams and easy access to some of the most stunning natural beauty in the country, there are plenty of other distractions for him that I didn’t have growing up. For all I know, the delight and fulfillment I find in sports he’ll find in music, art, theater, video games or any other pursuit that’s available to him. And whatever that is, I’ll gleefully immerse myself in it, too.
On that night, though, I got to introduce him to something I love. And I’m not sure I could have picked a better setting or conference for it.
(Photos: Associated Press, Albuquerque Journal, me)