There is always talking about this school or that school keeping a certain school out of a certain conference. Can one school like Southern Methodist keep North Texas from becoming a member of Conference-USA? Could TCU keep North Texas out of the Mountain West Conference? Could LaTech keep North Texas out of the WAC?

The answer is not really. A check with CUSA, WAC and Mountain West Conference officials found the required vote needed to gain admission to their respective conference. Now each conference does consider a lot of things when looking at a new member, such as location, facilities, education standards, sports they field, competitiveness in other words what they bring to the table we not interested in for this story.

What we were interested in was once an institution passes all the requirements for admission to the conference and it gets to the voting stage can one conference team keep the applicant out?

CUSA replied “a college or university may apply for membership to the Commissioner. That application would then be reviewed by the Board of Directors (Presidents and Chancellors) and athletics administrators. To be elected for membership, the applicant would have to receive at least three-fourths approval from the Board.” In other words nine votes with three objections will get a team in. 

MWC replied “upon the affirmative vote of three-fourths (3/4) or more of the members of the Conference’s board of directors (the “Board of Directors”), an institution of higher education which meets the qualifications set forth in the Articles of Incorporation and these bylaws may be admitted as a new Member.” With the nine present conference members ¾ vote would require 6.75 members for approval so it is rounded up to seven members. When July rolls around there will be ten members which will means 7.5 teams will need approval or rounded up to eight.

As for the WAC “new members may be admitted to the Conference by the affirmative vote of at least three-fourths of the Board of Directors. So, new members would need six of the eight votes.”

So, if North Texas applied for membership to any of the three conferences, and met all the conference criteria for membership, three teams would have to vote against them to keep them out of the MWC and the WAC with four negative votes in CUSA.

Assuming a conference is interested in expanding and North Texas applies and meets the requirements one team can not keep them out of the conference.

In the case of CUSA, could SMU keep North Texas out? The Ponies would have to convince three other teams to vote against admission; TCU would need two more teams to agree with them and the same for LaTech in the WAC.  (Just using those teams for example and not saying they are for or against North Texas admission to their conference.) In any case, when it comes to voting, no single team can vote against another team’s admission to the conference and prevent them from getting in. They could lobby against admission in order to convince other teams in the conference to see things their way.