Benson’s departure bodes ill for the WAC’s future

When Karl Benson was named the commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference this week, he noted, “I had the privilege of being on the sideline three times for Bowl Championship Series games with the Western Athletic Conference.”

And now, Benson told a media teleconference hopefully, “I’m looking forward to being on a BCS sideline with a Sun Belt team.”

Seeing a Sun Belt team in a BCS game might be a vision too far, but there is a much better chance of it happening for Benson’s new employer than the one he leaves behind.

A half-century after the WAC debuted, Benson’s departure to the Sun Belt is the surest sign that the lights are about to be turned out on its future as a football conference.

The conference that the University of Hawaii rode to one of those BCS appearances and a couple of top-20 finishes is, sadly for those of us who have witnessed the demise, on its last legs.

It might stagger on for a couple of years and could endure as a basketball entity, but its football days — and it has had some memorable ones — are numbered. Probably countable on one hand.

Ever since Boise State fled, with Nevada and Fresno State in hot pursuit, the WAC has been on borrowed time. The thought, however, was that the end of the WAC as we know it would be signaled when Utah State or Louisiana Tech moved on to another conference.

Nobody thought it would be when Benson, the man who doggedly gave it CPR for more than a decade of a nearly 18-year tenure, ran out of breath first.

As teams got up and left and the WAC’s pulse grew weaker, Benson kept pumping, determined to save the patient. Relentlessly he kept going out and bringing back replacement members, a dozen of them.

Never mind that two or three times he gave member presidents blueprints for a grander, more stable WAC. One thing he couldn’t do was save the presidents, his bosses, from themselves.

For example, he preached a 12- or 16-team, two-division WAC to Rice, Texas-El Paso and others nearly a decade ago. But they left anyway and are about to embrace just such a plan. Only now it is one that is stretched much farther across the continent and suggests desperation.

Just 19 months ago he delivered “The Project” — a plan that could have reunited the WAC with much of the Mountain West if only presidents from Fresno State and Nevada — mostly Fresno — had sat still for 72 hours. But they didn’t and the jail break was on.

The WAC that the late Gov. John A. Burns spent a decade getting UH into was the perfect home for the Warriors for a quarter-century. It gave UH validity and allowed it to grow — and not just in football.

But that WAC, weakened by defections and greed, has long since ceased to exist for UH, which, fortuitously, will soon take its own leave.

Believe it or not, when the MWC and Conference USA announced their impending amalgamation this week it revived second guessing in some precincts about the advisability of UH’s departure from the WAC.

Those curious thoughts lasted about two more days until Benson’s announcement ended any notion of WAC survival.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com.