Western Kentucky has demonstrated a consistent ability to compete in Conference USA since joining the league in 2014, despite the waves of changing membership that have impacted the league in the realignment era.

The CUSA of 2024-25 bears little resemblance to the league WKU joined a decade ago. Only four of the other schools then part of Conference USA – UTEP, FIU, MTSU and Louisiana Tech – remain.

CUSA continues to reconstitute, with Kennesaw State joining this year to bring the membership back up to 10 schools after New Mexico State, Jacksonville State, Liberty and Sam Houston State joined last year. Two more members are on board to join next year for the 2025-26 academic year in Delaware and Missouri State to bring the league up to a more stable 12 members.

“It’s just been one year with the new membership, but I think from a competitive standpoint, it’s worked out very well,” Western Kentucky athletic director Todd Stewart said. “Geographically it’s a challenge – it’s a league that a year from now will stretch from Dover, Delaware, all the way to Las Cruces, New Mexico. I mean, it really is Conference USA. But that’s not just us. If you would’ve told me there would be a day when Stanford and Cal would be in the ACC and Oregon, Washington, Southern Cal and UCLA would be in the Big 10 … I mean, it’s just the way it is right now, which doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, but that’s just part of it.

“But I think from a competitive standpoint and adding schools of credibility, Conference USA has done that, and where we sit in the fall of 2024 is a lot better than where we were in the fall of 2021.”

It was just three years ago when CUSA was just another domino in a rapidly shifting college landscape. Some member schools, dissatisfied with a patchwork broadcast arrangement that limited revenue and maximized fan irritation at finding games on national TV, were looking for an exit. Six – Charlotte, Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Rice, UAB and UTSA – defected en masse to the American Athletic Conference, which had first been raided by the Big 12. Three more CUSA schools – Marshall, Old Dominion and Southern Miss – left that same week for the Sun Belt Conference, opting to not even wait a year to join their new league.

Down to 11 members for the 2022-23 season with the impending loss of the six joining the AAC, CUSA had to find new membership to survive. WKU played a pivotal role in helping reconstruct the conference with WKU President Timothy C. Caboni elevated to chair the conference’s board of directors.

At the same time, WKU was considering its options. A widely publicized mutual interest between the Mid-American Conference and Western Kentucky – along with longtime conference partner Middle Tennessee – ultimately did not materialize into a formal invitation from the MAC to either school.

“I won’t lie, in the fall of 2021, there was a lot of concern just with the schools that had left and what did that mean,” Stewart said. “What did that mean for us, what did it mean for our conference. I remember a conversation that I had with one of the athletic directors from one of the six schools that left. I was really frustrated in the fall of 2021 because we were having success and schools that weren’t were going to the American. And he said something that kind of resonated – he said, ‘I’ll be honest with you Todd, if everything about Western Kentucky was exactly the same but you were in Nashville, you’d be No. 1 on everybody’s list.’

“But we’re not in Nashville and we’re never going to be in Nashville. That was a realization that we just have to refocus on what we can control.”

That left WKU and the remaining CUSA schools facing the uncertainty of a rebuilt league with an odd geographical footprint and two schools making the jump up from FCS-level football for the first time. Widely maligned as the worst of the Group of Five conferences remaining, CUSA found its footing in year one of the new alignment as at least respectable – new member Liberty led the way by reaching the Fiesta Bowl, with Western Kentucky and Jacksonville State each beating Sun Belt teams in bowl matchups.

It was a scenario that consistently repeated in sport after sport for CUSA, with the new-look league proving as capable of competing as any other G5 conference.

Stewart said WKU took the approach that “a rising tide lifts all boats” in seeking new conference partners.

“I think when you add Liberty, a high-resource program with great facilities, they’re competitive in virtually everything,” Stewart said. “It makes our league better, and it makes winning our league more meaningful. Jacksonville State and Sam Houston State, those are programs that had a lot of success at the FCS level so you know it matters to them. You know they care, you know they’re going to care at this level. And they have – Jacksonville State had a great year last year and won the New Orleans Bowl. New Mexico State’s had success, too – that all helps. And I think it will kind of settle down a little bit now.

“Our fans aren’t as familiar with those schools as they were the other ones. I’m not as familiar with those schools as I was the other ones, but having gone through one whole cycle of that, there’s good leadership at all those schools, there’s a commitment to winning and it’s worked out about as well as it could.

“ … I just think you want people that aspire to be good. That level of competition makes everybody better and it makes championships more meaningful.”

Now in the second year of a five year grant-of-rights agreement between the CUSA members and its media partners – exiting the conference early would result in an $800,000 annual payout for each year remaining on that deal – the resulting stability has been welcome for league members. The media revenue and exposure increased as well, with CUSA benefiting from a slate of weeknight football national broadcasts in October – that will happen again this year.

“The TV deal that we signed was different. It was certainly unconventional, but I think there were more positives than negatives particularly from an exposure standpoint,” Stewart said. “We actually worked with the Nielsen Company last year. We were curious, OK, now that we have these weeknight games, what does it mean? We knew it was more exposure, but what does it mean? The media value exposure of the football season alone last year was $34 million. It’s not $34 million if we don’t have the weeknight TV games, it’s less than that. So we’ve got to continue to find new and different ways to do things, be creative – be smart, but be creative also.”

In the new-look CUSA, the playing field has tilted somewhat in WKU’s favor. With an annual budget for athletics believed to be close to $30 million, the school now ranks in the top half of Conference USA in that regard after years of being near the bottom in the previous incarnations of the league.

“Financially, we’re in a healthy position right now,” Stewart said. “I think we’ve had some challenges that we’ve overcome. There’s more challenges around the corner. There probably always will be. At times, it feels like defending the Alamo just with everything going on both internally and externally and the changes in the system, but it’s not just us. It’s everybody else too. And our goals haven’t changed – our goals are to compete for and win conference championships and go to NCAA tournaments and regardless of how the landscape changes, our goals won’t.”

Of course, continuing to generate revenue and cultivate a robust donor base for athletics remains a critical task for WKU. The school formed an official partnership with Red Towel Trust – the official collective for WKU in terms of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) fundraising, while the school’s Hilltopper Local Exchange facilitates putting together local companies interested in working with student-athletes on business deals – anything from appearances to commercials.

“I would encourage fans to contribute to (Red Towel Trust),” Stewart said. “When people say how can we help, that provides direct support to athletes. And we put a stipulation on that they have to do community service, so they are giving something back. But again, I say when you look five years from now – and probably even less than five years from now – you look at the programs across the board that are having success, it will be because they have a collective that is growing and having an impact, that they have NIL opportunities for their athletes, that they also have a good infrastructure in place and good facilities in place. All those things matter more than they ever did.

“ … Our donor base in terms of both numbers of people and total amount of money raised is as high as it’s ever been. That part’s been good – it’s been growing, which is something that’s great. Now, it needs to continue to grow – that can’t ever flatline or level off because there’s just so many needs. You have the traditional program needs that you always had and then you have facility needs, but now you add NIL and the collective and all of that. So it’s never been more important to externally grow your revenue.”

Even maximizing the potential of the WKU donor base and creating additional revenue streams through new media partnerships and other avenues will only take the school so far in terms of competing on a financial basis with the larger schools previously known as the Power 5.

“I do think there will come a point at which it is what it is, and that’s probably the biggest challenge not just Western Kentucky faces but I think every Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, even the AAC and the Sun Belt,” Stewart said. “They all face similar challenges in that it just doesn’t continue to grow exponentially. It’s just going to be too difficult. We will continue to do all that too, but I think what our focus is on is the realization that we’re not going to be able to outspend everybody. But we can out-experience a lot of people, and that’s really what we’re trying to do here. Yes, we will do NIL and you’ll have NIL and opportunities through the collective to make money outside your sport.

“But when I say out-experience people, it’s when you come here as an athlete, you will win. I think it’s proven now that you’re going to have success because we have a winning culture, but beyond that, what we’ve invested a lot in the last five years alone and continue to is what we call the student-athlete centric areas – the areas that directly impact their ability to succeed on a daily basis. For example, strength and conditioning, nutrition, sports medicine, mental health, academic advising, career development.

“That infrastructure that is in place in all those areas makes their ability to succeed and I would think their experience here much better than if they didn’t exist. And then you have the bricks and mortar part of it, the actual facilities that they live in, train in, operate in. And by a year from now, that will be the best it has ever been in the history of WKU athletics – when the press box is finished soon and when the Hilltopper Fieldhouse is finished next summer, we’ll be in a great place. When I say out-experience people, I think you come here those things all will work for you and lead to a great experience.”