Could the Mountain West send San Diego State’s basketball team, as a parting gift, to play at Grand Canyon next season?
There is increasing chatter that the remaining seven Mountain West members, now that SDSU and four others have submitted formal notifications of their departure in 2026-27, will consider appeals from one of their replacements to join the conference a year early.
Grand Canyon currently does not belong to a conference for 2025-26 and has not hidden its desire to jump to the Mountain West immediately. When it accepted an invitation from the conference last November, the school’s release included the cryptic wording that it would join “no later than July 1, 2026, but possibly as early as the second quarter of 2025 if permitted under the conference’s bylaws.”
It’s the second quarter of 2025.
Mountain West bylaws require a three-quarters vote from its membership, which officially dropped from 12 to seven members last week when SDSU, Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and Utah State withdrew and were removed from the board.
The five departing schools — or Pac-stabbers, as some are calling them — are united in their opposition to Grand Canyon’s early entry, according to a conference source.
But the remaining seven, which now hold exclusive voting power, might be open to discussion — and open for business, especially if Grand Canyon offers financial incentives for inclusion in 2025-26.
SDSU, in particular, has PTSD from a pair of trips to GCU Arena and its Havocs student section that ranks among the loudest in the nation. Both were Antelopes wins, including a 79-73 decision in December 2023 against the No. 25 Aztecs that was the first in school history over a ranked opponent.
When Rick Pitino took a Louisville team to 7,000-seat GCU Arena in 2016 and escaped with a win, he noted: “In college basketball, my 40-plus years, (that) was the toughest crowd I’ve ever faced. … Whether we go to Duke, Kentucky, nothing was as tough as that environment tonight.”
There’s also likely no financial incentive for the departing five, since anything the Mountain West would receive from Grand Canyon presumably would be distributed only among the remaining members.
Welcoming the Antelopes a year early faces logistical challenges for fall sports. The Mountain West recently released a women’s volleyball schedule, and teams are already making travel arrangements with conference games starting in September. The women’s soccer schedule, a league spokesperson said, is completed and will be announced soon.
But GCU doesn’t play football, and the Mountain West schedule for its other marquee sport, men’s basketball, typically isn’t released until late summer. The Antelopes have reached the NCAA Tournament the past two years out of the Western Athletic Conference, and getting an at-large berth as an independent is a far more difficult proposition.
“The earliest possible is when we will join,” GCU athletic director Jamie Boggs told “The Big Mountain Podcast” earlier this year. “We are excited to get in as soon as we can. When it’s mutually decided that we can enter, we will. I can’t express how excited we are to get as soon as we can.”
That’s because they might have nowhere else to go.
They officially exited the WAC, thinking they were headed to the West Coast Conference starting July 1. Then they declined the WCC invite last November, with the WCC weakened by Gonzaga’s imminent departure for the Pac-12 and the Mountain West needing reinforcements.
The WCC sued GCU in federal court for breach of contract and unpaid exit fees, and you figure it’s not about to house the Antelopes for one year. The WAC has released fall schedules without them, either.
Court is where any attempt by the Mountain West to bring GCU aboard this fall could wind up as well. The five departing schools could seek an injunction preventing the other seven from making decisions that impact them for 2025-26, their last year in the conference.
Complicating everything is that the Mountain West and Pac-12 are in mediation for two lawsuits about an estimated $145 million in exit and poaching fees. Conference and school officials have been reluctant to comment about the mediation — or anything else, for that matter — given the sensitive nature of the negotiations.
The Grand Canyon question continues to simmer in the background, though.
GCU coaches have been telling recruits for months that they expect to play in the Mountain West in 2025-26, according to their Mountain West counterparts in multiple sports.
The conference office, a source said, has fielded numerous calls from member schools on this topic and responded the same way every time: GCU’s agreement currently has a July 1, 2026, start date “and that’s what we are going by.”
The presidents of the remaining seven Mountain West members held meetings earlier this week before scattering for summer vacations, and a source said Grand Canyon’s early admission was not on the board’s formal agenda.
Another possibility may be a basketball scheduling agreement similar to what Oregon State and Washington State had with the Mountain West for football in 2024. Both teams played six games against MW schools that didn’t count in the conference standings.
The next best thing is beefing up an independent schedule with quality games against a team like SDSU, which returns the bulk of its roster and has appeared in some preseason top 25s.
The Mountain West currently has 11 basketball members and plans to play a balanced 20-game conference schedule. Grand Canyon would make it 12, forcing an unbalanced schedule where not everyone plays everyone else.
For now, there is no indication that will happen, especially with exit fee mediation still ongoing. Once there’s a signed agreement between the two parties, the Mountain West’s remaining seven members may be more inclined to consider Grand Canyon’s wishes.
“The Mountain West has always been attractive to us,” Boggs, GCU’s AD, told “The Big Mountain Podcast.” “We are very invested in basketball, and Mountain West basketball programs are impressive. … It was an obvious choice for us. I think the fit was right as well.
“For us, it was not a question of whether or not we should go.”
The question, then, is how soon.
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