“UMass will join the MAC in all sports (including football), Auerbach wrote. “They’ve been an FBS independent.”
UMass is a charter member of the A-10, which was known as Eastern Collegiate Basketball League when it was founded in 1975. Villanova, Duquesne, Penn State, West Virginia, George Washington, Massachusetts, Pittsburgh, and Rutgers were the original members. Only GW and UMass remain in the A-10 now.
UMass would be the first school to leave the A-10 since 2013. It lost Butler, Charlotte, Temple and Xavier that year.
Since 2013, the A-10 has added George Mason, Davidson and Loyola Chicago. It now has 15 members. The departure of UMass would drop the number to 14.
The UMass football program moved to the Football Bowl Subdivision and competed in the Mid-American Conference from 2012-15 before becoming an independent program. It has never had a winning season at the FBS level.
The UMass basketball program dominated the A-10 for a stretch in the 1990s, winning five straight A-10 tournaments (1992-96). UMass has not won the A-10 tournament since and has appeared in one NCAA tournament (2014) in this century.
From a basketball perspective, UMass will leave the nation’s eight-ranked conference, according to KenPom, for the nation’s 24th-ranked conference.
The addition of UMass would give the MAC 13 schools. The last school to join the MAC was Marshall in 1997. It left the conference in 2005.
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