Q&A: Mountain West Conference commissioner Gloria Nevarez
The second-year commissioner talks about planting the flag on the West Coast, how the TruTV deal came together, coaching turnover and much more.
Gloria Nevarez just wrapped her second media days as Mountain West Conference commissioner. In some ways, that makes here a veteran in this league. A whopping seven of the MWC’s 12 schools have new football coaches in 2024.
Still, the conference is on relatively stable ground after the realignment chaos that engulfed much of the country last year. And it welcomes scheduling additions this year in Oregon State and Washington State.
We spoke with Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould earlier in the week. Now, let’s turn to Nevarez, who was kind of enough to chat by phone Thursday.
(The following Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
I'm not sure I've seen a league that has more new coaches than more incumbents, seven out of 12, and a lot of them are big names, too. What's that dynamic like?
Gloria Nevarez: Well, it's interesting. Certainly, seven new coaches is a lot. It’s funny, we’re like, ‘Should we wear nametags?’ But the interesting thing about the Mountain West is we've always been a substantial part of the pipeline for FBS. And we are the in that place where we tend to get a lot of first-time in the chair presidents, ADs, administrators, coaches, and when they have success here they tend to move on to the next thing. But yet, this league, even before the transfer portal popped open, seems to just rebuild and keep advancing. Like that basketball team at San Diego State that went to the Final Four, it was almost a completely different roster the next year, and they went to the Sweet 16. It's part of our DNA.
I'm sure it feels like it's been more than a year, but this was your second media days and your second time going through it all as the face of this conference. How different was it for you this time around?
GN: It’s the difference between going into a party where you don't know anybody and going into a party where you see a lot of familiar face. There’s a relaxing and almost like, ‘Hey, great to see you,’ type of vibe to it. My year one was my year one; that's always got some newness to it. But also the whole membership issues were hot topics, and now I feel like we're good. And you could talk about the football and forward-planning and instead of being reactive you can really just talk about vision, future planning, that type of thing.
What do you hope to see and get out of your arrangement this year with Oregon State and Washington State?
GN: You'll see it in our schedules. They actually added a tremendous strength of schedule to us, which is really, really helpful. Because scheduling is hard, it's hard to get games. So we're really excited about this agreement. But when you look up and down our nonconference schedules, we have 35 (games) against the A4; the next closest league is at 26. So that is a tremendous testament to our coaches swinging for the fences, and also a signal that they believe in the strength of their teams.