After further review, HBS editors have determined that this article is inaccurate, and therefore retract the claims made in it. The article will remain up for posterity and archival purposes. Read more here.
Amidst a struggle for dominance against the Pac-12, the Mountain West Conference has been trying to expand themselves after losing 5 teams to their rival. Already having notified the MAC of their intent to convince Northern Illinois and Toledo to join, their conference website was updated Thursday, showing Idaho in the football standings, according to a tweet by the /r/CFB subreddit.
This was presumed to be accidental, and potentially leaking a possible move up to FBS for Idaho. But, while pursuing additional info on this development via Google, HBS discovered a page on the Mountain West website for Idaho. This seemingly confirmed the widespread theory that Idaho was joining. However, we were curious, so we replaced “Idaho” in the web address with the names of a few other schools that could be targeted.
We found the jackpot.
Pages were found for Sacramento State, Montana, Montana State, North Dakota, South Dakota, NDSU, Eastern Washington, UConn, Gonzaga, Portland State, Idaho State, and UTEP. There were neither pages for heavily rumored target UC Davis, nor FCS superpower South Dakota State. Subsequently, pages were not found for the previously announced three schools that are being targeted.
However, pages were also found for schools that are completely unrelated to the situation, such as Iowa and Florida. There is not a page for every school, but these additional pages significantly decrease the chance of our speculation being true. Either way, these findings could open the door to even more info on this volatile situation.
HBS is unable to confirm whether or not these schools are in talks with the conference. There are no further details available at this time.
9/27/2024, 2:09PM CDT: Edited to mention the lack of a page for South Dakota State, and add UTEP to the list of links.
9/27/2024, 2:27PM CDT: Edited to mention the finding of team pages unrelated to MW/Pac-12 realignment, and include the link to the RedditCFB tweet that began the investigation.
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