The 2010–13 Western Athletic Conference realignment refers to the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) dealing with several proposed and actual conference expansion and reduction plans among various NCAA conferences and institutions from 2010 to 2013. Moves involving the WAC were a significant part of a much larger NCAA conference realignment in which it was one of the most impacted conferences. Of the nine members of the WAC in 2010, only two—the University of Idaho and New Mexico State University—remained in the conference beyond the 2012–13 school year, and Idaho departed for the Big Sky Conference after the 2013–14 school year. Five pre-2010 members are now all-sports members of the Mountain West Conference (MW), and another joined the MW for football only while placing most of its other sports in the Big West Conference. Another pre-2010 member joined Conference USA (C-USA) in July 2013.
After the first defections from the conference were announced in 2010 and 2011, the WAC attempted to reload by bringing in five new members for 2012, but four of these soon announced moves to other conferences that took effect in 2013, with Seattle University being the only 2012 entrant to remain in the WAC beyond the 2012–13 school year. The WAC added six new members in 2013.
These moves resulted in the WAC dropping football as a league-sponsored sport after the 2012 season; it became the first NCAA Division I FBS conference to drop the sport since the Big West did the same after the 2000 season. The only two remaining football schools, Idaho and New Mexico State, became independent programs for the 2013 season and returned to football-only membership in the Sun Belt Conference starting in 2014 (both had been either all-sports or football members of the Sun Belt in the early 2000s).
Nearly a decade later, the WAC reinstated football, resuming play in 2021. However, this league does not play in FBS, but rather in the second tier of Division I football, the Football Championship Subdivision. Also, for the 2021 season, the FCS version of the WAC was a partnership with the ASUN Conference, a non-football conference that announced plans to launch its own FCS football league in 2022. Additionally, during the 2020s conference realignment that coincided with the WAC reinstating football, UT Arlington, which had been a WAC member in the 2012–13 school year, announced its return to the conference effective July 1, 2022.
Background
The WAC was founded in 1962 by six schools in the interior West, five public and one private—the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, Brigham Young University (BYU), the University of New Mexico, the University of Utah, and the University of Wyoming. The creation of the WAC directly led to the demise of the Border Intercollegiate Athletic Association (or Border Conference) and Mountain States Conference (popularly known as the Skyline Eight), and soon led to the creation of the Big Sky Conference in 1963.
The conference added two more schools later in the 1960s, with Colorado State University and the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) arriving in 1967. The WAC's competitive balance, especially in football, became heavily skewed in the 1970s toward the Arizona schools due to rapid growth in that state, and they would leave in 1978 to expand the Pacific-8 Conference into the Pacific-10. San Diego State University joined at the time the two Arizona schools left; the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (Hawaiʻi or UH) joined the following year, and the United States Air Force Academy (Air Force) arrived in 1980. The conference then remained stable for more than a decade, with the next change being the addition of California State University, Fresno (Fresno State) in 1992.