Mountain West adds Grand Canyon for upcoming season against wishes of SDSU, others

After months of fielding calls from member schools saying they were hearing Grand Canyon would join the Mountain West a year early, and the conference office responding that their agreement says the Antelopes aren’t coming until July 1, 2026, “and that’s what we’re going by” — surprise, it just happened.

“In the spirit of partnership,” a conference release Tuesday morning said, “the Mountain West extended a unique opportunity to GCU and its student-athletes, allowing them to compete for conference championships and NCAA postseason eligibility immediately.”

It’s an interesting choice of words: the spirit of partnership.

San Diego State and the other four schools departing for the Pac-12 next year opposed early entry by Grand Canyon, according to conference sources, but were not included in the vote. Once the five gave notice of their intended departure from the Mountain West in late May, conference bylaws allowed for their removal from the board and all voting rights for the ensuing year.

“While SDSU remains an active member of the Mountain West through June 30, 2026,” a university statement said, “the university was not consulted or permitted to vote on the early invitation to Grand Canyon University, which is surprising and disappointing given prior representations that the Mountain West and its Commissioner made to SDSU and the negative impact this addition will have on already-planned athletic competition schedules for this academic year.

“We will need to evaluate this announcement and make adjustments due to this addition.”

Boise State released a similarly terse statement, saying the decision “significantly and negatively impacts schedules, opportunities, and budgets of Boise State and the other departing universities.”

It added: “We will address this matter and the harm to the departing universities in the litigation.”

It is unclear whether that’s current or future litigation. There had been private talk about filing a lawsuit and seeking an injunction if the Mountain West went ahead with the Grand Canyon decision, arguing that the conference’s remaining seven members were making decisions affecting the other five without their consent.

That isn’t expected to happen, at least not immediately, given the tense nature of other litigation between the Mountain West and Pac-12.

Separate lawsuits over exit and poaching fees totaling close to $150 million were combined into a “global” mediation that began May 19 and has dragged into the summer. Both sides are motivated to reach a resolution — the five departing members and the Pac-12 so they can pay less than the rack rate, and the Mountain West so it can start receiving funds to redistribute, as promised, to the seven schools left behind.

Another lawsuit might slow, or even halt, those negotiations. More likely, the discontent over Grand Canyon will be addressed in the mediation.

The thought among some athletic administrators was that the Mountain West would settle the exit and poaching fees lawsuits first, then spring the Grand Canyon decision on the so-called Pac-stabbers.

But as May mediation, initially expected to take a few weeks, slogged into July and the start of fall sports seasons grew closer, it amounted to a game of chicken: Would the Mountain West keep waiting, or pull the trigger at the risk of upending the mediation?

“The addition of Grand Canyon for the 2025-26 academic year is a significant win for the student-athletes at GCU and in the Mountain West,” Commissioner Gloria Nevarez was quoted in the release. “In a time when the student-athlete experience is of utmost importance, we felt it was in the best interest to allow them to compete for conference championships and the NCAA postseason immediately.

“GCU is a great addition to the Mountain West and positively raises the competition level in the league.”

Grand Canyon was among the replacements last fall after SDSU, Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and Utah State announced they were leaving for a reformed Pac-12 in 2026-27. The agreement was for GCU and the others to formally join the Mountain West that year as well.

But even then, the wheels were in motion for 2025-26.

GCU’s news release last November 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.” There were also multiple reports of Antelopes coaches telling recruits they’d be in Mountain West a year early.

That’s because Grand Canyon had nowhere else to go. It had left the Western Athletic Conference after accepting an invitation from the West Coast Conference starting in 2025-26, then reneged when the Mountain West came calling. The WAC wouldn’t take them back, and the WCC sued GCU for breach of contract.

That meant a year as an independent, which would be particularly harsh on its powerhouse men’s basketball program that has reached the NCAA Tournament for the past two years and has one of the largest NIL war chests on the West Coast.

But Grand Canyon, the nation’s largest Christian-based university, has seemingly endless supplies of money and is believed to have offered the remaining seven Mountain West schools a lucrative payday to solve its conference predicament for 2025-26.

A three-quarters vote is necessary for membership decisions, and it’s unlikely GCU would have gotten that with all 12 voting members.

The biggest issue with the Antelopes is they’re not like the rest of the animals in the Mountain West ecosystem. Grand Canyon is the lone private, religious-based university in a conference of large public institutions; it doesn’t play football, allowing it to focus an inordinate amount of resources on men’s basketball; it has more than 100,000 enrollment between online students and its 300-acre Phoenix campus; and it is still considered by some regulatory bodies to operate as for-profit despite nonprofit status from others.

There are back-and-forth battles with the Department of Education, which fined GCU $37.7 million in October 2023 because “it lied to more than 7,500 former and current students about the cost of its doctoral programs,” only to rescind it last May under the Trump administration.

During a House Appropriations Committee hearing last year, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) asked Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona about GCU, which she characterized as “a predatory for-profit college.”

Cardona responded: “They have a shiny brochure and a great commercial, but the product is not worth the paper it’s written on. … We are cracking down on them, not only to shut them down, but to send a message across the country that you cannot prey on our students and expect to be successful.”

GCU called Cardona’s comments “reckless” and demanded a retraction.

It also has among the most intimidating home-court advantages in college basketball, something SDSU knows well, having lost there in 2016 and 2023. The Antelopes’ 79-73 decision over the No. 25 Aztecs two years ago was their first in school history against a ranked opponent.

SDSU lost to GCU at Viejas Arena in 2015 as well as part of a home-and-home nonconference series.

The 11-team Mountain West moved to a 20-game conference schedule for men’s basketball last year against the wishes of SDSU, which wanted the flexibility of more nonconference games to better build an at-large NCAA Tournament resume. The argument in favor was to have a fully balanced schedule, where everyone played everyone else twice.

The addition of GCU makes it 12 teams for 2025-26 and the Mountain West is locked into 20 conference games, meaning they’re … back to an unbalanced schedule. And meaning one team won’t have to play at GCU Arena and face the Havocs student section while everyone else will.

The basketball schedule typically isn’t released until late summer, but the conference schedule for women’s volleyball, which is a fall sport, has and presumably will be revised despite programs already making travel arrangements. Women’s soccer is just weeks away from the season, too.

“We are incredibly appreciative of the Mountain West Conference’s support of our student-athletes, our university and our fans for the opportunity to compete this fall,” GCU President Brian Mueller said in the Mountain West release. “Lope Nation has grown first and foremost because of the innovative strategies and creative delivery models that enable us to provide cutting-edge academic programs both on our campus and across the country.

“That has created a tremendous amount of momentum that benefits our athletic programs.”

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