Carifio: NIU’s move to Mountain West has risks, but fewer than staying in the MAC

DeKalb has no mountains.

Tuesday night football is awesome.

After two days of think-pieces and social media posts, those two arguments are essentially the main ones being made against NIU football joining the Mountain West Conference.

And yes, both things are true. DeKalb has no mountains and is not in the West. Last time I checked, Standford and Cal aren’t on the Atlantic Coast.

And also yes, MACtion is great.

But neither are reasons to jeopardize the future. College football is about to change very quickly, and NIU administrators have taken a big swing to give the school’s athletics the best chance to survive.

NIU athletic director Sean Frazier kept mentioning Tuesday four factors that necessitated the move west. The big one is the House vs. NCAA case. Without going too far into the weeds, basically college athletes are going to be paid by the schools very soon. Schools can opt in and need a decision in a few months. Frazier said NIU is all in.

It’s a revenue-sharing model that goes to all student-athletes, not just from one or two sports.

It’s a complicated legal mess well above my pay grade. But this much is clear: In order to share revenue, you need revenue.

Both Frazier and Lisa Freeman said multiple times Tuesday that NIU’s deal with the Mountain West leaves them comfortable. Of course, they did not specify what comfortable means.

From past reports, NIU gets $833,000 from the current ESPN deal, just like the other Mid-American Conference schools. The Mountain West will have a new TV deal in place when NIU starts in 2026, and we don’t know what that’s going to look like.

And frankly, that’s the biggest risk in this whole endeavor. The Mountain West has done what it can, positioning itself across four time zones. It’s got the Central time zone for the early window if it wants. And there’s a memorandum of understanding in place between the seven Mountain West schools that didn’t leave for the Pac-12 that guarantees $3.5 million in TV revenue. Even if the contract is short of that, the league will foot the difference from other sources.

Frazier did not comment on how specifically this affects NIU. He did say NIU has a football-only share of the revenue but did not say what percentage that is. Usually 80% is a number that’s tossed around and reflective of other similar deals.

You can come up with some nightmare scenarios. And it’s not just money. What if, say, Fox Sports wants to get into the Tuesday night game business? What if the best offer comes from Fox Sports and features Midweek Mountain Madness or #MMM or whatever?

A big part of the attraction for NIU is Saturday games. The Mountain West has some Thursday and Friday games, but that’s better than Tuesday. Better for fans. And most importantly better for athletes trying to get to class.

Now, the odds of that happening are, I would hope, between slim and none. But it just highlights the uncertainty of the move.

But there’s also so much uncertainty of staying put. If NIU stayed in the MAC, would the Mountain West have pursued another MAC school such as Toledo, which was rumored to be an initial target for the MWC along with NIU? Even if not, how long before some other conference came calling? The Pac-12 isn’t going to remain at seven schools forever. Even if the replacement didn’t come from the MAC, the replacement’s replacement could.

NIU tried playing as an independent, and later in the Big West, in a time that corresponded with some of the leanest years for football in the 1980s and ’90s. Frazier is aware of that. But he kept pointing to those four factors - the House case, NIL, the portal and the playoff – as being game-changers and difference-makers this time around.

NIU wasn’t west then, and they aren’t now. But geography isn’t why the move didn’t work out four decades ago. School officials are doing what they think is necessary to secure the future of the university. It’s a risk, but so is doing nothing.