HOUSTON — Whether John David Wicker, San Diego State’s athletic director, has several leather-bound books or an apartment that smells of rich mahogany, he could be forgiven for channeling his inner Ron Burgundy.
With the men’s basketball team in the national championship game, which it lost to Connecticut on Monday night, and with two major conferences eyeing the Aztecs as a potential addition, San Diego State is, indeed, somewhat of a big deal.
“The world has heard us,” Wicker said Saturday night before the Aztecs won a thriller over Florida Atlantic on Lamont Butler Jr.’s jumper. at the buzzer to advance to the title game. “But now they know who we are.”
San Diego State has been quietly competent for more than a decade in men’s basketball and soccer. They have won at least 20 basketball games every season but one since 2005-6. (They fell to 19-14 in 2016-17.) And their football team has gone to 12 straight bowl games — not including the 2020 season cut short by the coronavirus pandemic.
Their moment, beyond this breakthrough NCAA tournament, is due in large part to the world changing around them.
When the Chargers left San Diego for Los Angeles in 2017, they left a void in the city that the Aztecs basketball and football teams have eagerly filled. And when Southern California and UCLA announced last June that they were locking up the Pac-12 Conference for the Big Ten, it opened another lane for San Diego State.
Suddenly, the Pac-12, with its next TV rights deal, had to keep Southern California, and the two schools unlikely to allow the Aztecs in were no longer part of the equation.
And if the Pac-12 isn’t interested, the Big 12 Conference is — Commissioner Brett Yormark has repeatedly expressed a desire to have a school in every time zone. Yormark watched Saturday night’s game, sitting about a dozen rows up, across from the San Diego State bench, with a clear view of Butler’s game-winning shot.
Conference realignment, of course, is rarely driven by anything other than money.
And it’s hard to say that many of those decisions have paid off anywhere but on the balance sheet.
Nebraska football has become a magnet since its move to the Big Ten from the Big 12 in 2011. Maryland’s rich basketball history is not valued in the Big Ten as it was in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Missouri has a similar story to tell since moving to the Southeastern Conference, away from its historic partners in the Big 12. And neither Maryland nor Missouri has been more than an afterthought in football.
Yes, Rutgers’ coffers are fuller — but so is the athletic department’s deficit, while the football program has fallen from competitive in the Big East to irrelevant in the Big Ten, having failed to win more than one conference game five times last eight seasons. (The rise of the Rutgers men’s basketball team is an exception.)
Soon enough, similar questions may be asked about whether the money grabs from Texas and Oklahoma—leaving the Big 12 for the SEC—and the Los Angeles schools were more short-sighted than smart. A path to the football playoff, even with an extension to 2024, looks much more difficult for all four schools.
And when San Diego State flew to Orlando, Fla., for the opening weekend of the men’s basketball tournament, halfway through the six-hour drive, administrators and coaches on the flight began to consider what the Los Angeles schools had in store.
“Even though it was a charter, I thought, my God, do these guys have to do this every other week to play a basketball game?” San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher said. “It would be exhausting.”
He added: “I wish them the best, but this is more of a journey than I would ever wish on anyone.”
What’s notable about all of these moves is that they’re sideways — from one of the so-called power conferences (Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Pac-12, Big 12 and the breakup of the Big East for football) to bigger TV deals .
San Diego State is looking at a different model — climbing the ladder.
For decades, this was rare. But the Big 12, after losing Oklahoma and Texas, adds Brigham Young, Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston. BYU brings a national fan base affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the other three schools have been national championship contenders in football or men’s basketball the past six years.
San Diego State, however, studies a rare conference realignment success story in Utah, which moved from the Mountain West Conference to the Pac-12 in 2011. Utah had already begun preparing for a move by investing in athletics and brightening academics profile of the university so that when television rights deals were being negotiated, the Utes were attractive candidates for expansion.
“That’s the road map,” Wicker said.
In recent years, San Diego State has aggressively courted research grants, built a new science and engineering complex, offered scholarships to the state’s top students and improved graduation rates in an effort to clean up its reputation as a party school.
The basketball program has been the next best West Coast program to Gonzaga for the past two decades and draws raucous crowds to the 12,000-seat Viejas Arena. The football program now has the 35,000-seat Snapdragon Stadium, which opened last August. The stadium is located a few miles from campus on the site of the old Jack Murphy Stadium, where the Chargers and Padres played for decades.
Funding for the stadium, part of a $3.5 billion, 135-acre redevelopment project to take place over the next decade or so, got the go-ahead just days after the pandemic hit in March 2020.
If there were questions about the wisdom of investing in college football at the time, the progress proved a boon on several fronts, Wicker said. When loan rates plummeted, the school was able to borrow money for the $310 million stadium at an interest rate of 2.78 percent, which it said will save about $2 million a year in interest payments. Also, the project contractor procured building materials promptly, before supply chains became clogged.
“At the end of the day, Covid helped us,” Wicker said. “If we had waited six months, I don’t know if we would have built the stadium. It would be much more expensive.”
After Monday, however, the Aztecs will be waiting.
Pac-12 presidents meet later this month and will discuss where they stand in ongoing media contract negotiations. Commissioner George Kliavkoff, who did not attend the Final Four, said expansion talks are likely to follow a media rights deal.
“We have a national perception now,” Dutcher said. “I think everybody outside the West always knew we were good. But now that we’re playing on the biggest stage and winning on the biggest stage, I think much like when Gonzaga took that step, they did it on a national stage. And that’s how they earned their respect.”
Not a bad position for San Diego State: heading into conference with a hat in one hand and a silver medal in the other.
