ACU left the Southland Conference four years ago to join the Western Athletic Conference alongside fellow Southland members Lamar University, Sam Houston State University and Stephen F. Austin University, hoping to find a long-term home for its athletic program for the future.

“This is a historic move for ACU,” Dr. Phil Schubert, president of the university, said at the time. “We are excited about joining a conference with the WAC’s history and visibility.”

It was deemed a new era for the WAC, with football being reinstated for the first time since 2012. The conference looked stable, moving forward with strong football and basketball schools.

Now in 2025, ACU is the only school left of the group dubbed the “Texas Four” that joined the WAC in 2021. With Lamar and SFA going back to the Southland and Sam Houston State moving up to the FBS level, what once looked like a promising conference for the foreseeable future is now having to question that future.

In addition, Grand Canyon University, California Baptist University and Seattle University have all accepted invitations to move to other conferences in future seasons.

With the most recent wave of conference alignment, the WAC is left with only six teams for the 2025-2026 season – ACU, Tarleton State University, University of Texas Arlington, Utah Valley University, Southern Utah University and Utah Tech University.

Differing Directions

Lamar left the WAC in June 2022 after joining the conference in 2021. Chicago State University also left the conference in June 2022. SHSU and longtime member New Mexico State University left the conference a year later in July 2023.

GCU and Seattle University were the first schools in the latest realignment to announce their departures from the WAC on May 10, 2024. They announced they had intentions to join the West Coast Conference in 2025.

In a move that surprised many, SFA and University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley made the decision to leave the WAC on July 1, 2024. UTRGV opted to pay the $2 million exit fee to the WAC.

On November 1, 2024, GCU flipped its decision to join the WCC and announced it would join the Mountain West Conference by 2026. This decision resulted in a breach of contract lawsuit filed by the WCC against GCU. As a result, GCU will most likely be without a conference for the 2025-2026 school year and must compete as an independent.

CBU revealed its decision to leave the WAC for the Big West conference starting in the 2026-2027 school year on March 19.

Utah Valley University has a pending invitation to join the Big West. Though it has yet to accept it, experts said it likely will. In fact, Kyle McDonald, WAC Hoops Nation reporter, said he would be surprise if UVU is in the WAC by the beginning of the 2026 season.

How the WAC got here

The WAC was meant to be a steady conference for both football and basketball that schools would want to join. With the “Texas Four” and Southern Utah joining a conference with established football schools NMSU, Tarleton and Utah Tech, football looked to be a main sport for the WAC.

However, when then-WAC commissioner Brian Thornton began making basketball-centric moves for the conference, it led some schools to question the conference’s dedication to football.

McDonald said this led to some of the football schools to wonder whether they made the right decision to join the WAC and question whether they should leave.

With the departure of Lamar, NMSU and SHU, the WAC was left with four football schools. The conference was unable to sustain football on its own, which required it to partner with the Atlantic Sun Conference to form the United Athletic Conference in 2023.

With no football, the conference lost some of its attractiveness for schools to join, leading to its current state of little growth and schools leaving.

ACU in the WAC Moving Forward 

With only six teams left for next season, the WAC is at the minimum number of schools a team can have to qualify for an automatic postseason bid. With less than six schools expected to be in the WAC by the 2026-27 school year, ACU is evaluating other options.

Athletic Director Zack Lassiter could not be reached to discuss those options, but Dr. Phil Schubert, president of the university, confirmed it’s the subject of conversation among university leadership.

“We don’t feel that’s a sustainable position long term, so we are in a very active mode of evaluating future conference alignment,” Schubert said. “That could involve building the WAC from the current base of six to a bigger number. It could involve leaving the WAC to go to another place, or it could involve some other type of innovative partnership with another existing conference.”

When evaluating future conference alignment, ACU is looking at different factors, including geographic centrality, philosophy of alignment of athletics, the competitive landscape and financial landscape.

At one point, the WAC featured eight Texas schools – ACU, Tarleton, SFA, UTRGV, University of Incarnate Word, UTA and SHSU. Now, with the majority of the Texas schools having left the conference, it requires bigger travel budgets for schools having to play in Seattle, California and Utah multiple times a year.

Schubert said the long-term vision for the conference when ACU joined was to have a Texas-centric conference.

Michael McBroom, SFA’s director of athletics, said in a press release last year that the move back to the SLC “aligns us with regional peers in Texas and Louisiana.”

Other Texas schools, including Lamar and UTRGV, also cited the lack of geographic centrality as a reason for their moves back to the SLC.

Schubert said when evaluating ACU’s future conference, he is in communication with Jennifer Evans-Crowley, UTA president, and James Hurley, Tarleton president. He said ACU hopes that if it must move conferences, it can stay with the other Texas WAC schools.

“I think the idea of a Texas-centric conference, if it were to ever become a reality, would have a lot of appeal to a lot of Texas schools to want to be a part of it,” Schubert said. “So, I don’t know that that’s available to us today. But I think continuing to look for that in the future would certainly be something on the top of the railway.”