THAT DEFLATING COLLEGE FOOTBALL BUBBLE.

Northern Illinois football recently changed its conference affiliation to ... the Mountain West.  Northern Star sports reporter Skyler Kisellus hopes for the best.  "Though NIU has left the Mid-American Conference before, its upcoming departure won’t backfire like its ill-fated 1986 exit."

The correlation of forces was not favorable for the Mid-American then, nor is it now.

Back in 1984, NIU was nearly a decade into its first stint in the MAC. The football team had just captured its first-ever conference title and its first ever bowl game as a Division I-A program, beating California State University, Fullerton in the California Bowl. Men’s basketball was only two years removed from an NCAA tournament season. NIU sports were having a pretty good stretch, to say the least.

However, the relationship between the school and the conference was out of its honeymoon phase by that point and had begun to unravel. That year, the NCAA threatened to demote the MAC to Division I-AA status – today’s equivalent of the Football Championship Subdivision – due to Eastern Michigan University’s falling attendance dropping the league below the mandated minimum. This irked NIU, whose main reason for joining the conference was to attain Division I-A status.

To solve its attendance problem, the MAC voted to make EMU the sacrificial lamb, booting them from the conference six weeks before the 1984 season. This irked the NCAA, who quickly decided to walk back its threat and allow the MAC and EMU to stay in Division I-A. But this would put NIU between a rock and a very hard spot.

Nothing changes.  That California Bowl season is still a point of pride around the athletics department, although that Northern Illinois team also made history in another way, being the team Northwestern ended a losing streak of Columbiaesque proportions against.  Football at Eastern Michigan has long been a losing proposition, whether on the field or on the income statement.

The hopes around the athletics office were that MACxit would lead to a great future for Northern Illinois as an independent in football.  (Over the years they cobbled together all manner of conference affiliations for volleyball, basketball, gymnastics, and the bats and balls sports.)

Instead, the school went independent from 1986 to 1992. This wasn’t a big deal at the time, as college football had 21 independent teams. But as time went on, more independents found homes in other conferences, while NIU was left adrift. Following a short stint in the Big West Conference and another year of independence, the Huskies came crawling back to the MAC in 1997 – putting NIU back at Square 1.

Where the Mid-American confronted the same challenges they did in the 1980s.  Yes, in DeKalb the football staff point to Wisconsin in 1988 and Alabama in 2003 and Nebraska in 2016 and Notre Dame last fall and assorted wins at Minnesota, Northwestern, and Purdue for the recruiting value: and yet they have scheduled more than a few guarantee games that end up as lopsided losses with multiple starters injured, all to keep the Mid-American from relegation.  And, apparently, television revenue can be traded against attendance.

Cut to 2025, and the college sports climate is hardly recognizable from what it was 40 years ago. Back then, there was no transfer portal. National champions were decided not on the field, but rather by an alphabet soup of mathematical formulas and human polls. The mere thought of college athletes making a single red dime was absurd.

Today, those taboos of old are the new norms. Issues like name, image and likeness, the pending House vs. NCAA lawsuit and media rights govern how decision-makers in athletic departments across the country navigate this new age of intercollegiate athletics. With those factors now at play, NIU’s choice to leave the MAC a second time seems far more practical and rooted in realism than the first.

This time around, the decision is clearly financially driven, and for a good reason: NIU desperately needs a cash infusion. At the end of fiscal year 2024, the university faced a $31.8 million deficit and the athletics department had lost $5.25 million. Those burdens will only get heavier once the looming $3.75 million cost associated with the House case hits.

Where would this cash infusion come from, you might ask? Media rights, of course. While NIU’s expected media revenues from the MWC haven’t been made public, they’re expected to be far richer than the MAC’s $833,000 annual media payout.

Now suppose financials had no bearing on this decision. Even so, breaking away from the MAC still looks great on paper for the sole reason that it rids NIU of its biggest attendance killer: weeknight games. While midweek MACtion was and still is a novelty concept, its drastic impact on crowd numbers can’t be understated.

Over the 20-year span from 2004 – NIU’s first season with a weeknight game – to 2023, the average attendance at Huskie Stadium plummeted 65% from 27,052 to 9,456.

Though the drop-off is staggering, it’s hardly surprising. A football game on a school night between two small market teams inside an open-air stadium with metal bleachers – all on a frigid November night – was always a hard sell.

As more than a few friends of the program noticed.  Although Saturday might be for college football, Saturday games with all sorts of travel and no local rivalries might not turn out well.

This time around, school officials seem to know what NIU is – and what it isn’t – and are planning accordingly. Football already has its spot reserved in the new-look Mountain West, while the search for a new home for the Olympic sports is still ongoing.

The Horizon League, Missouri Valley Conference, Ohio Valley Conference and the Summit League have been floated as potential landing spots for the Huskies – all of which would give NIU a better chance to compete and greater geographic convenience than it had before.

In the end, time will tell if this latest maneuver by NIU ends up being another cautionary tale or the bold leap that lets the Huskies live happily ever after.

Ah, yes, the Horizon League, which emerged from the ruins of the North Star Conference.  With the university facing operating losses, and with some local high schools either combining their football programs to continue to field eleven-player platoons, or competing with eight-player teams, or dropping football altogether, perhaps "conference realignment outside the power conferences" will come to resemble the rearranging of deck chairs on a sinking ship.