The Skyline Conference was a college athletic conference based in the Western United States that was active from December 1937 to June 1962. The conference's formal name was the Mountain States Athletic Conference, although it was also known as the Mountain States Conference along with informal but popular nicknames. It is unrelated to the contemporary Skyline Conference that is active in NCAA Division III in the New York City area.
History
The conference began operating on December 3, 1937, when most of the larger schools in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference left to form a new conference.[1] The seven charter members of the conference were: BYU, Colorado, Colorado A&M (now Colorado State), Denver, Utah, Utah State, and Wyoming.[1] At the time of formation, the formal name of Mountain States Athletic Conference was adopted,[2] although newspapers were already calling it the Big Seven at that time.[3] The conference became popularly known as the Skyline Conference or Skyline Six after Colorado left in 1947.[4] Colorado joined the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MVIAA), informally known as the Big Six Conference, which took over the Big Seven name and would later become the Big Eight Conference.
The conference became known as the Skyline Eight after New Mexico and Montana joined in 1951.[5] The conference officially dissolved as of July 1, 1962, after four of its members (BYU, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) departed to form the Western Athletic Conference (WAC).[6] Montana operated as an independent for one football season in 1962 until the formation of the Big Sky Conference in 1963. Colorado State became independent until it joined the WAC in 1968. Utah State operated as an independent for fifteen seasons, until it joined the Pacific Coast Athletic Association (later named the Big West Conference) in 1977.
^Montana joined the Mountain States after a year of independent play during the 1950–51 school year following several decades of membership in the Pacific Coast Conference (PCC).
