Carifio: NIU may be the canary in the coal mine for separating football, Olympic sports

The dust has finally settled on the Great Conference Realignment Adventure® starring NIU, the Mountain West Conference and the Horizon League.

Well, mostly settled, as the NIU wrestling and gymnastics teams still officially need a home, although president Lisa Freeman and athletic director Sean Frazier said they felt confident those sports would remain in the Mid-American Conference as affiliate members.

On paper, the universities transition to the Mountain West for football and the Horizon League for most of its Olympic sports starting July 1, 2026, seems beneficial overall. We don’t know what the Mountain West’s new TV deal will look like in 2026. But if it resembles the previous deals, it will generate significantly more revenue for NIU and allow for more Saturday games.

Frazier said the move of the Olympic sports from the MAC to the Horizon will save $400,000-$500,000 on travel alone, especially with UMass re-entering the MAC in 2025.

It’s not exactly a common practice to split football and the Olympic sports. Throughout the process, Frazier has brought up the service academies as an example. Army and Navy are members of the American Athletic Conference for football and the Patriot League for their other sports.

You also could point to Notre Dame, an independent in football and in the ACC for its other sports.

So is NIU’s decision to split its conferences like this going to be the wave of the future, or is it just a situation that works for a handful of schools?

It sure seems like NIU is going to be the test case for a lot of other universities.

“You have to think about skating to where the puck is going to be, to use a Wayne Gretzky term, and this is all about that,” Frazier said. “If there were others that were thinking about this, they can take a look at NIU and they can say, ‘OK, I see how he did that. I see what they were trying to do there.’ ”

Frazier is obviously gung-ho on the idea. He said NIU was fortunate to be in the position to be able to do that.

Aside from the financial benefits, all of NIU’s programs should benefit from this. The football team moves to a higher-profile conference with, again, the potential for much more revenue. And from an academic standpoint, not playing midweek games is a boon, as well.

The other sports will travel far less, again a boon to the student part of student-athlete. There is one MAC school within 250 miles of NIU. The Horizon has four – Green Bay, Indiana-Indianapolis, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Purdue-Fort Wayne. Robert Morris is the only Horizon League school more than 475 miles away, while the MAC has three.

Frazier said he doesn’t like when football drives the fates of Olympic sports. He alluded to the former Pac-12 teams finding homes in the Big Ten and ACC, having to fly from coast to coast.

Frazier said he’s glad NIU can set up its conference portfolio in this manner.

“Some schools may have this option, and some schools may not,” Frazier said. “The fortunate part is that NIU is one of them.”

There’s also going to be sticklers to tradition, like we saw when some people threw a hissy fit because there are no mountains in DeKalb, forgetting that neither Cal nor Stanford is on the Atlantic Coast.

“There are going to be some people who are purists. ‘Oh, every sport needs to be in one conference. Why are they doing that?’ ” Frazier said. “Because it’s threatening what they know.”

There’s change coming to college football, even more than we’ve seen with NIL and the transfer portal. We’ll see if what NIU is doing sets them up better for whatever those changes are.

For now, and this may end up being the worst take of all time, it sure seems like they made the right call.

• Eddie Carifio is the Daily Chronicle sports editor. Write to him at ecarifio@shawmedia.com.