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Forget touchdowns, poll rankings and bowl matchups. The battle between the Western Athletic Conference and the Mountain West Conference is headed to court.
The WAC has filed a lawsuit against its rival conference, as well as Fresno State University and the University of Nevada, in an effort to keep the schools from jumping from the WAC to the Mountain West before 2012.
Both schools said last month they plan to join the Mountain West next year — when both Utah and Brigham Young leave that league — but the WAC contends they missed a deadline for notifying it of their move. The WAC also contends that each school owes it a $5 million exit fee as part of an agreement to keep the league together.
The lawsuit was filed in District Court in Jefferson County, Colo., according to the Reno Gazette-Journal.
It makes more than 20 allegations, and asks that Nevada and Fresno State not be allowed to leave the WAC before June 30, 2012. It also asks that all defendants be banned from scheduling games that interfere with those to be played against the remaining WAC members through the 2011-12 season, as well as "further relief as the court sees fit."
WAC Commissioner Karl Benson did not return phone calls Monday, after saying on his league's weekly teleconference that he was not ready to discuss legal issues. Mountain West officials declined to comment.
But a spokesman for the University of Nevada confirmed to the Gazette-Journal it had received the lawsuit, and said the school was disappointed because the sides had not had any discussions about resolving the conflicts.
Both Fresno State and Nevada had agreed to stay in the WAC until 2016, presuming BYU joined it in all sports except football once the Cougars left the Mountain West.
But five days later, on Aug. 18, both schools accepted invitations to join the Mountain West, which invited them in an attempt to avoid collapse after news broke that the Cougars were leaving so they could play football independently.
The departure of Nevada and Fresno State from the WAC forced BYU to change its plans, though, and most of BYU's sports teams ultimately joined the West Coast Conference.
The WAC has said Nevada and Fresno State needed to notify it by June 30 if they planned to leave in 2011, and did not. The schools maintain the deadline was Sept. 1, according to an annual league code book whose rules apparently differed from the league by-laws.
The WAC also maintains that both schools owe it $5 million after agreeing on that amount as an exit fee for leaving before 2016. But the schools say that agreement was valid only if BYU's nonfootball sports joined the WAC, which they ultimately did not.