Blanchette: WAC may inspire Seattle’s aspiration

So now TCU and the Big East are making goo-goo eyes at one another. When did eHarmony get into the business of matching colleges and conferences?

Was there really something so terribly wrong with the original concept of schools banding together out of like-minded missions and geography? And why don’t the Major Players – the 50 or 60 real heavyweights – just save us all the drama and declare themselves independents now, and then rendezvous later in new made-for-TV leagues?

Not that it will stop all the worrying and wooing in the strata below.

Just last week, the Western Athletic Conference – the league most desperate to reinvent itself – interviewed five prospective expansion members, both eager and coy. That none of them at the moment has a Football Bowl Subdivision program implies that what the WAC will be reinventing itself as is the Sun Belt West.

One of the more intriguing suitors was none other than Seattle University, which has been dead set up to now on regaining membership in the West Coast Conference with Gonzaga and other ecclesiastical pals.

The Redhawks – and another interested private school, the University of Denver – don’t play football, period. But the WAC needs to hustle reinforcements on the basketball end, too, and Seattle needs a family, even a far-flung football conference with members stretched across five time zones.

“If you think that’s bad,” said Seattle athletic director Bill Hogan, “try being an independent.”

Point taken. Nine long basketball road trips in the WAC at least guarantees nine home games that the Redhawks won’t have to rustle up elsewhere.

But, it would seem to be an odd and unlikely match. Which, in the current climate of college athletics, would seem to make it a lock.

So where does that leave the Seattle-WCC relationship?

The Redhawks – actually, the Chieftains then – were WCC members from 1971 to 1980, at which time its president, Fr. William J. Sullivan, declared Division I athletics to be an icky cesspool and retrenched. Three years ago the school’s trustees voted to do the D-I dance again.

Even after the WCC hierarchy told the school there would be no expansion to admit them.

So much for the guys with the collars cutting one of their own a break.

Nonetheless, that very circumstance – four of the eight WCC schools are Jesuit institutions, like Seattle – suggested the Redhawks’ inclusion was an inevitability. But something’s changed in the WCC’s leadership over the past 5-10 years. Athletic decisions are actually made with athletic excellence in mind.

Which is not to say Seattle U. can’t or won’t be excellent. In just their first year of D-I basketball, the Redhawks went 17-14, beat Oregon State by 51 points and stood 192nd of 347 teams in the Ratings Percentage Index. That was higher than four WCC teams – though without a comparable strength of schedule. Still, an admirable start.

But when the opportunity arose this summer, the WCC welcomed Brigham Young, with no overture to Seattle. And commissioner Jamie Zaninovich’s rationale couldn’t have been more blunt:

“If we expand,” he said, “we’re going to expand to make ourselves better.”

Hogan insisted he was not disappointed about being leapfrogged by BYU.

“I didn’t really have any thoughts on that,” he said. “That they were willing to move beyond eight teams after 30 years, that was a big move. It was good for the league.”

If another snub for Seattle.

“We were told, about last summer, that there was a moratorium on membership,” he said, “that they wouldn’t even discuss it until 2012.”

So now the Redhawks are fishing where the fish are biting.

“I was always interested in the WAC,” Hogan insisted. “I see three distinct positives. It’s a league of larger state schools, there’s the (FBS) football element and we’d be the largest market in the league.

“The WAC is an aspirational league. It just feels like a league where the sky’s the limit. Where was Boise State 10 years ago?”

Well, OK. But those positives are as dubious as they are distinct. There is no obvious commonality between small, secular SU and those larger state schools, Idaho among them. It is, really, a football-driven league. And three schools – including Boise State – are vamoosing; others seem to be teetering. One man’s aspirational is another man’s unstable.

But then, Idaho did time in the Sun Belt, too, out of necessity. A school’s gotta do what a school’s gotta do.

“We’re interested in exploring any option that affords us some stability in a Division I league,” Hogan said.

Doesn’t mean it has to be forever. Like the man said, it’s an aspirational league.