The Mid-American Conference announced Wednesday it will stand pat with 12 full member institutions after examining expansion, just hours after Middle Tennessee State University made known it was sticking with Conference USA.
The decisions by the MAC and MTSU appeared to bring an end to a wave of conference realignment in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the upper tier of Division I, that was triggered this past summer as Oklahoma and Texas announced they will leave the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference no later than 2025.
That led the Big 12 to swipe three schools from the American Athletic Conference, which then turned to Conference USA for six new members. The Sun Belt also added four new schools, three of them from C-USA.
MTSU and fellow C-USA member Western Kentucky University had explored the possibility of leaving the conference, and they could have extended the Midwest-based MAC farther south. However, after C-USA announced last week the addition of four new members (Jacksonville State, Liberty, New Mexico State and Sam Houston State) starting in 2023, MTSU decided it was best to stay put in a conference that will now have nine schools stretching from Virginia to New Mexico.
Sidney McPhee, president of the Murfeesboro university, said in a statement posted on the school website Wednesday that MTSU has watched the Division I landscape for athletics change in the past several weeks and appreciated the interest that other conferences showed in its program but that C-USA ” is poised to rebrand itself as a premier conference in the Group of 5.”