The ASUN-WAC football merger/partnership now has an official name: the United Athletic Conference. Here’s what you need to know.
- The ASUN and WAC have partnered in football for the last two years due to low conference membership numbers, with the first-place team earning an automatic spot in the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs.
- That waiver from the NCAA expires soon, and the sides have asked the NCAA Board of Directors to recognize this as an NCAA football-only conference.
- Leaders in this group have said they hope for a potential move to the Football Bowl Subdivision in the future.
Backstory
The nine teams in this league are Abilene Christian, Austin Peay, Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, North Alabama, Southern Utah, Stephen F. Austin, Tarleton State and Utah Tech. Texas Rio Grande Valley will also begin football in 2025.
According to the UAC release, “the United Athletic Conference now fully operates like a single-sport conference with an independent budget, policies and governing documents. The group will recognize its own league champion and at-large FCS playoffs automatic qualifier under a singular conference banner beginning with the 2023 football season.” The conference will play six games in 2023 and eight in 2024.
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The FCS has multiple football-only conferences, including the Missouri Valley Football Conference (where powerhouse North Dakota State resides) and the Pioneer Football League, which is a non-scholarship conference. Other FCS leagues have combined for football scheduling purposes as membership numbers have decreased.
But there is currently an NCAA moratorium on the creation of single-sport conferences, which has been in place since April 2020. A February meeting report from the Division I Council indicated the council and the Division I Football Oversight Committee did not support the WAC-ASUN request to be an official conference. WAC assistant commissioner for communications Tony Jones told The Athletic in an email Monday the league believes it will pass.
“The NCAA is convening a board meeting later this month to address the current moratorium on single-sport conferences, and our football conference is among the items on that agenda,” Jones said. “Our combined leadership in the football league is hopeful that in formally declaring a name and identity that it will help spearhead the official effort in the coming weeks by showing that a conference infrastructure is already demonstrated to be in place.”
Can the UAC become an FBS conference in the future?
It seems unlikely. The primary goal of this partnership was to create an FCS league and figure things out from there. Executive director Oliver Luck will spend this year doing an audit of the nine teams in the league to gauge what’s in place at each school. The idea is that there isn’t a rule saying a conference can’t move up to FBS, but everyone else I’ve spoken to in the FCS is extremely skeptical it can or will happen. There’s also no interest from the 10 FBS leagues in sharing any College Football Playoff money with another conference. — Vannini
(Photo: Ed Zurga / Getty Images)
