John Lennon announced that he was leaving The Beatles at about the same time the Big West Conference banded for its first athletic contest.
The league’s inaugural sports season kicked off when Long Beach State visited UC Santa Barbara for a football game on Sept. 20, 1969.
Campus Stadium wasn’t yet called Harder Stadium … and the league’s original name of Pacific Coast Athletic Association wouldn’t be changed to Big West for another 19 years.
And although neither UCSB nor Long Beach State still play football, they are the only founding members that remain in the league.
Lennon would explain it all lyrically a decade later in his song “Beautiful Boy”:
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
The Big West is now 55 years old, but it doesn’t look anything like the league it envisioned during its first council meetings, held on the UCSB campus in October 1968.
It hasn’t sponsored football now for 24 years, and its revolving door of schools has included 25 full and associate members in the last 5½ decades.
The most recent to hit the exit are Hawai‘i and UC Davis, both of which will become members of the Mountain West Conference in July 2026.
“It’s not that surprising to me,” said Kelly Barsky, UCSB’s director of athletics. “We’re in a time that institutions and conferences have to really strategically and intentionally make decisions that make sense and are the best fit for serving their institutions in their locale.
“They’re both a little unique, as we are in the things that we do.
“I think you have to have a real open and growth mindset, and understand that there’s going to be some shifting.”
Diminishing the Pac-12
The shifting landscape of the National Collegiate Athletic Association has produced a series of mind-jolting earthquakes.
They’ve fractured the once mighty Pac-12, in particular, like a slab of sandstone.
USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington now find themselves on the other side of the Rocky Mountains in the Big Ten Conference.
Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah took their move as a cue to bolt to the Big 12.
That watered the Pac-12 down into a four-pack, prompting Cal and Stanford to take the desperately absurd leap across the entire continent and join the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Oregon State and Washington State were left out in the cold by their small media markets.
The Pac-2, however, tipped the dominoes of conference realignment back into motion by poaching Gonzaga from the West Coast Conference, and Fresno State, San Diego State, Boise State, Colorado State and Utah State from the Mountain West.
That left the Mountain West door open to Hawai‘i and UC Davis.
The Big West is allowing Hawai‘i to keep its men’s volleyball, beach volleyball, women’s water polo and men’s swimming and diving programs in the league.
UC Davis made a request last week for the same accommodation from the Big West for its beach volleyball, and men’s and women’s water polo teams.
“I don’t have any personal insight, one way or another, if that will happen,” Barsky said. “That just needs to be submitted and processed through the conference level.”
UC Davis’ football program will, for now, remain in the Big Sky Conference.
The Aggies, who lost to South Dakota in Saturday’s quarterfinals of the NCAA Football Championship Series, would need a substantial increase in their budget and some stadium improvements to join the Mountain West in the Football Bowl Series division.
“We’ve had a successful year, but some of these teams possess infrastructure and resources that we need to match,” UC Davis athletic director Rocko DeLuca said.
“Should we enhance our competitiveness, the future of FBS football is wide open for exploration.”
But the Aggies’ decision to quit the Big West for the Mountain West was undoubtedly spurred by their desire for such a football upgrade.
Sacramento State — their nearby rival in Big Sky football — motivated them by announcing its own intention to build a major-college football stadium.
The Hornets hope the new facility would help them attract an invitation from the Pac-12, which still needs to add members.
No SLO-Going
Cal Poly’s failures in Big Sky football and its tiny media market of San Luis Obispo make it less of a Big West flight risk.
And the Gauchos are glad for that.
“I love when we lean into the regionality of our conference … the regionality of that fun, Blue-Green rivalry across all of our sports,” Barsky said. “We love having them as partners.
“I can’t speak for them, but I think the Blue-Green rivalry will be continuing and healthy.”
Holding the rest of the Big West together is another question. The league roster will be at just nine schools by the time Hawai‘i and UC Davis depart in 2026-2027.
The Mountain West might want to tap into the Los Angeles media market by inviting Long Beach State and UC Irvine — two of Big West’s higher-profile schools — as nonfootball members.
And perhaps UCSB, too?
“I can’t really comment on when or where we receive outreach for those kinds of things,” Barsky said.
“What I’m willing to say is that we’re going to continue to lean in on what we’ve built out, and will continue to build out our strategic plans.”
She does like UCSB’s place — athletically and academically — in the current landscape of the National Crazy Athletic Association.
“I was thinking about this last night as I was driving,” she said. “You look at Amelia Honer, who’s one of the top tennis players in the country and just won a gold medal with Team USA (at the Master’U BNP Paribas Championship earlier this month in France).
“There’s Manu (Duah) and Alexis (Ledoux) from the soccer team, who went to this week’s MLS Showcase, and baseball’s Tyler Bremner (a Gaucho pitcher who is projected to be a top-four pick in June’s Major League Baseball draft).”
Ajay Mitchell, Barsky added, has bolstered UCSB’s prestige in the basketball world with his stellar play as an NBA rookie with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
“We also have a lot of student-athletes who are going on to be professionals in something other than their sports,” she said.
“We’ve had some really special, historical demonstrations of excellence even in this modern era.”
The Big West’s future, however, remains the billion-dollar question — which is about what it costs to compete nationally in this football-driven era.
The league, after all, couldn’t replay that UCSB-Long Beach State football game when it celebrated its golden anniversary five years ago.
But then, booking a Beatles reunion for the halftime show would’ve been out the question, too.
