Once upon a time, NIU made the daring decision to leave the confines of the Mid-American Conference and venture out into the great unknown of independence. What followed was an embarrassing saga that eventually brought the Huskies back to where they started.

Four decades later, NIU is making sure history doesn’t repeat itself.

On Jan. 7, NIU announced it would join the Mountain West Conference as a football-only affiliate member in 2026 – a move that signals the school’s second split from the MAC. Only this time, NIU is moving on at the right time and for the right reasons.

But to best illustrate the differences between now and then, it’s important to understand the circumstances that led to what has been regarded as one of the worst decisions in the 125-year history of NIU Athletics.

THE NO GOOD, VERY BAD BREAKUP

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.

After EMU was pushed out the door, NIU expected to only have to play eight conference games in 1985 and accordingly scheduled three Big Ten Conference opponents for non-conference play. Once the Eagles were back in the fold, the Huskies had nine MAC teams to play, but only eight games open on its schedule.

Then-athletic director Bob Brigham’s solution to the predicament was to cancel a game against Kent State University, which was met with immediate pushback from KSU. Then-MAC commissioner Jim Lessig resolved the issue by pitting Kent State against the University of Texas at El Paso – while having NIU foot UTEP’s travel bill.

Lessig then rubbed salt in the wound with his comments to the Chicago Tribune pinning the blame for the fiasco on NIU.

“Northern jumped the gun on scheduling,” Lessig said. “But I told them they’d have to show up for every conference game from now on. If we hadn’t come up with a solution for Kent State, I’d have been forced to take drastic action.” 

These comments, combined with other grievances with the MAC and aspirations for stronger competition, led to NIU’s announcement on Nov. 6, 1985, that it would abandon the Ohio-based conference after the 1985-86 academic year, with Brigham calling the MAC “conservative and unimaginative.”

Surely, with how quickly matters went downhill, NIU had another conference lined up, right?

Narrator: It did not.

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.

NAVIGATING A NEW AGE

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.

IDEALISM VS. REALISM

Above all else, the major difference between the moves now and then has nothing to do with money or ratings and everything to do with planning and execution.

Looking back, the NIU administration of the mid-1980s was too ambitious in its decision-making, and seemed to have the illusion NIU would join a name-brand conference or thrive as an independent and become the next University of Notre Dame. Both were bold strategies, but equally doomed to fail.

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.