Saturday, March 8, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
IT'S THE MOVE everyone in town wanted to see and, to this day, it seems as if UNLV is a good fit in the Western Athletic Conference.
One football and one basketball season into the relationship, it would be easy to picture everything nice and cozy.
UNLV had outgrown its previous league, the Big West Conference, and the WAC has always had a certain lure and appeal. It's a wide-open, offense-minded football league and a diverse basketball circuit with plenty of depth.
The teams and coaches are interesting, the programs are solid and the 16 member schools assure a unique variety.
It's a league UNLV can be comfortable in.
It's also the league that best suits UNLV in that the Pac-10 or the Big 12 might be a little more than a still-young-and-growing UNLV is ready for.
But ... ask UNLV Athletic Director Charlie Cavagnaro how he feels about the WAC and he doesn't mince his words, at least when it comes to the league's sprawling, nine-state size.
"It's not working," he said. "It's like someone rolled a bag of marbles on the floor, then picked up the first 16 they saw and said 'that's our league.' My perception is that 16 is entirely too many."
WAC Commissioner Karl Benson has heard this before, from countless angles.
"I'm always being asked, 'How long can a 16-team conference survive?'" he said. "I think the answer is, it's too soon to tell. But we've always been the one conference with the largest land mass, and we've always been an airplane conference. We always will be an airplane conference."
Benson, exceptionally accessible and a terrific front man for the league, came to the WAC from a bus league, the Mid-American Conference. In the MAC, each of the Midwestern cities is remarkably similar to the others, as are the school sizes and goals. It's all very cohesive.
The WAC, however, represents the ultimate in diversity.
"We're just the opposite of the MAC," Benson said. "But I like it, even if I've come to the realization I'm not going to make everyone happy. My style is to try and make everyone happy, but it's impossible in this situation."
With 16 teams, it's out of the question for league members to play any sort of round-robin schedule on a yearly basis. As a result, the league has two divisions (and four quadrants) and no getting away from this stark reality: WAC members might go years without facing a particular league opponent.
"I don't like that, because the very fabric of any league is developing rivalries," Cavagnaro said. "Rivalries make a league, and to have rivalries you have to have consistent scheduling. We don't have that now."
Asked for a possible solution, Cavagnaro said "there's always a solution, but I'm not sure what it is here." What he meant is that there may not be a solution with 16 teams.
"Clearly the WAC has been good for our football program and clearly we've been good for the WAC in many other sports, like men's basketball," he said. "The people in the WAC are wonderful, terrific.
"But I want us to be in a league that's going to be all it can be. I don't want us to accept average.
"To do less or to settle for less would be a miserable failure on our part and on the league's part."
He sees UNLV as "still a new kid on the WAC block, but my assumption is that scheduling will be discussed and worked on in conference meetings."
Benson agreed that it would be.
"We're still evaluating our scheduling philosophy," he said. "I know not everyone is satisfied, so it'll receive considerable discussion."
UNLV, one of six new members in the WAC this school year, may have its scheduling complaints, but the older members of the conference have another issue on their front burners.
"Their shares (of conference revenues) have decreased now that we're splitting them 16 ways, instead of 10 ways," Benson said. "Their shares are smaller and that's a concern. Our goal, then, is to generate enough revenues to satisfy all 16 schools."
The 10 "pre-expansion" schools, as well as the six newcomers to some extent, "are waiting to see how our next TV contracts turn out," Benson said. The implication: The older conference members want to see their revenues revert to where they were in 1996, not where they'll be in 1997.
So the WAC is not quite as idyllic as it appears on the surface. Some schools are taking in less money and other schools are hoping the league will be reduced in size by a natural or imposed attrition.
But, for whatever reason, might UNLV bail out of the conference within the foreseeable future? It sounds drastic and maybe ill-advised, yet it's obviously a possibility.
Is UNLV merely passing through the WAC?
"That's a fair question," Cavagnaro replied, unsure himself yet surprisingly open to the suggestion.
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