 Before forming the Mountain West Conference, seven of its eight charter members had been longtime members of the Western Athletic Conference and half of these had been charter members of that conference from 1962.Overall, each school that has ever been either a full or football–only member of the MW spent at least three years in the WAC before joining the Mountain West.The creation of the MW was a delayed aftereffect of the 1996 NCAA conference realignment, which had initially been triggered two years earlier when the Big Eight Conference agreed to merge with four members of the Southwest Conference (SWC) to create the Big 12 Conference, which would begin competition in the 1996–97 school year.