Every D1 conference name, ranked from least to most made up

Does anybody really believe the America East exists?

NCAA conferences have some very silly names, for a variety of reasons.

For one thing, it’s just hard to come up with a good name for such an abstract thing. Geography is probably the most popular place to start, but it’s become less useful with time given that for many conferences, location is just a suggestion nowadays. More and more of the most obvious names have been taken, and often prestigious conference names will end up meandering down to lower levels, or else falling under the purview of growing leagues that see no reason to give up naming rights. We may never see another Big Eight or Pacific Coast Conference, to give a few examples. Even someone trying to resurrect the Southwest Conference, whose original trademark was actually cancelled back in 2006…would probably get sued out of existence by the similarly-named American Southwest Conference in D3.

In a perfect world, 32 leagues in Division I would probably be a small enough number that they could all have reasonable, distinct, and easily identifiable names. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and while some of these conferences are named well, others are a lot more…questionable. There are a lot of criteria we could judge them by, but it’s hard to be objective—in a certain sense, after all, “Big Ten” and “Big 12” are extremely silly names. Those aren’t even the right numbers!

For the sake of this piece, though, we’ll be defining our criteria in a way that explicitly favors the power conferences¹. On account of how established and popular they are, the names of these leagues just feel real to us, and others that follow the same convention feel similarly real. You’ve probably never heard of either the East Coast Conference or Conference Carolinas—both D2, by the way—but doesn’t one just strike you as a little more legit? And doesn’t one sound a bit like it could’ve been concocted as an offhanded reference in a made-for-TV sports movie?

That’s our measuring stick. For each of those 32 conferences in Division I, which names feel the most made up?

Not Made Up

First off, I’m happy to report that nearly half of D1 lands in this category. It could be a lot worse, as any glimpse at the names frequenting lower divisions will show!

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. The six commonly acknowledge power conferences—the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and Southeastern Conference (SEC)—are all 100% above board. It would be ridiculous to claim that any of these don’t feel like a proper conference name—they practically define the most popular formats for naming athletic conferences. The only one you could even hope to argue against is the Big East; as we’ll see later, it’s failed to really established “Big + [cardinal direction]” as one of the standards for a conference naming format, while the rest of the P6 have all spawned dozens of perfectly-reasonable sounding imitators. But the Big East has been around for nearly half a century in one form or another, and it’s certainly managed to avoid sounding at all fake in its own right.

Next up is one particular conference that stands on its own: the Ivy League. As with the Big East, it’s got a naming convention that feels a bit awkward when others try to latch onto it, but there is literally zero argument that the Ivy League sounds made up. Everybody knows it, even if it’s not for athletic reasons.

Cardinal directions on their own are the next-easiest to accept, with an extremely long and storied history in college sports dating back to the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, founded in 1894. (You know it better as the forerunner to the SoCon, and thus to the ACC and SEC, which to this day still share a majority of their memberships with teams that were once in the SIAA.) In this spirit, other easy stamps of approval include the Northeast Conference (NEC), the Southern Conference (SoCon—hey, we know those guys!), the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), and the Western Athletic Conference (WAC).

One step over from these leagues are conferences that apply a cardinal direction to a geographic feature. Here’s where things start getting a little tricky, and you could argue some of these names aren’t quite so clear-cut, but they are still drawing on a P6 standard (the ACC’s, in this case), so I’m gonna count ‘em. That gives us the Missouri Valley, the Mountain West Conference (MWC), the Ohio Valley Conference (OVC), and the West Coast Conference (WCC). These all get bonus points for picking out names that correspond to a preexisting region, too.

Speaking of regions, that’s where our last and least slam-dunk pick for this category comes in. The Sun Belt is a bit more suspect because its name isn’t quite as obviously geographic as the quarter listed above, which can be a bit of a slippery slope. Fortunately, though, they did pick out a very well-known nickname for a particular region of the United States, and you’ve gotta give them credit for sticking to it pretty closely with their membership. (Uh…well, aside from when Idaho was a member.) It may not be with flying colors, but I think they pass.

Maybe Made Up

Once again, we’ll start with the most purely geographic conferences, since there are a few outliers that don’t make it all the way to the top. As much as I love the Mid-American Conference (MAC), it’s a little hard to believe that anybody would willingly put “mid” in the name of their league. Besides, “mid-American” isn’t a phrase you hear much when “midwest” and “middle America” both cover anything you might want to refer to using it. In a similar boat is the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC), which I’d put a tick lower because “mid-eastern” is something you barely hear at all in reference to the US, and because—let’s be honest here—it absolutely feels like a fake league that would be used as a stand-in for the MAC.

The American Athletic Conference (AAC) is a bit of an outlier in this group, but I’m gonna throw it here because, technically, American is a geographic term. The problem is that it’s so unbelievably vague that it conveys literally zero information about what teams are in the conference, given that D1 has no programs outside the United States at the moment. At least, judging by the current alignment of the conference, they’ve really embraced the name and gone all-out on adding teams from every corner of the country…aside from anywhere past the Central Time Zone, anyway.

You can clearly see the P6 influence in the names of the Atlantic 10 Conference (A-10), Big South, and Big West, but it doesn’t quite seem to work for them. In the A-10’s case, it kinda feels like they’re trying too hard—they even have the completely wrong number in their name, true to power-conference form, and members as far inland as St. Louis and Chicago, which matches the Pac-12 and ACC’s gradual abandonment of their supposed regions. I feel like they could’ve gone with something that captured the conference’s region, largely confined to a narrow coastal stretch between Virginia and Massachusetts. As for the Bigs South and West, they’re imitating the most made-up of the P6 conferences, and it doesn’t help that they’re competing with other in-region leagues whose names are actually used for the area in question from time to time.

The Big Sky is in a similar boat, with a couple differences: it loses points for entirely lacking any direction in its name, but gets them back because the full name is a region, more or less. What separates it from the Sun Belt, though, is that it’s missing a crucial word. Big Sky Country is a geographic place, more specifically Montana—you could probably use it to refer to other places in the conference’s territory, but I’m guessing you would draw the ire of a few Montanans in the process, which is probably ill-advised. “Big Sky”, though, isn’t a phrase you would use in isolation, and I’m docking the conference for that. Needlessly petulant and pedantic? Absolutely. That’s what we do here.

In a lot of ways, the Coastal Athletic Association (CAA) is a mirror to the AAC. Changing the “Colonial” in their name to “Coastal” was a good move in general, and it also boosts them a little here, but it’s still lacking some specificity. A glance at a map will tell you the name refers to the East Coast, of course, but without that context it sounds more like a proposed rebrand for the ACC once they add Stanford and Cal. Certainly feels convenient for a writer to drop this one into their script so they don’t have to figure out what region the movie’s set in, exactly.

Let’s round this section out with a couple dubious attempts at geographic naming schemes. The Southland is basically just a worse version of the Sun Belt—living in the footprint of both leagues, I’ve heard the latter name a bunch, while the former is probably more common in The Rings of Power than in the American South. At least it sounds nice? Meanwhile, the Summit League does successfully pick out a nice, distinctive geographic feature…just one that really isn’t found in its region, which covers the extremely un-mountainous likes of Kansas, Iowa, and the Dakotas. It probably belongs in our final category, but it’s hard to be too down on it given that it was called the Mid-Continent Conference until 2007. You can only go up from there.

Totally Made Up

These six are the real stinkers, the ones that prompted this idea in the first place. It is so, so easy to see any of their championship games as the climactic moment of a film about a jock and a nerd who learn to see eye-to-eye while leading Great Southwestern State to the final. Somehow, though, they’re all Division I conferences. That’s what I’m told, anyway.

Let’s continue with two nominative neighbors of the Summit—the Horizon League and Patriot League. What really sets these apart is that they’re not even trying to tell you what region they’re in, even misleadingly. To make matters worse, the Horizon even had a fairly reasonable name back in the day: the Midwestern Collegiate Conference, which is an excellent descriptor for a membership that largely covers Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. They changed it in 2001…because people kept getting it confused with the Mid-Continent Conference. Tragic. The Patriot is a bit better, especially because it at least has something to do with the conference as a whole; the name derives from its selectivity, second only to the Ivy League in D1, and to its high standards for student-athletes. Very cool! Doesn’t change the fact that “Patriot League” is something you most likely win by lateraling to the often-overlooked receiver who you know has a spark of greatness in him.

The Atlantic Sun and America East are a lot alike, each featuring a broad geographic term combined with another word that adds absolutely nothing to the conference name. At least conferences like the Big West are trying to match those established P6 conventions—these titles are really just two terms thrown together, particularly the disaster that is “America East”. Maybe if they combined their efforts, they could put together something better; Atlantic East sounds pretty reasonable, after all! Which is why it’s already taken by a recently-founded D3 league. Aw, crabapples.

Conference USA (please, C-USA was its father, call it CUSA) has a very strong case to land at the bottom of this list. It’s a fittingly meaningless and empty name for a league that keeps finding new ways to become a shell of itself, and despite predating the AAC by quite a bit, it feels like a knockoff version of that conference’s name. Its one saving grace is that it’s been in continuous use since 1995, and quite a few notable teams have passed through in that span—UCF, Cincinnati, DePaul, Houston, Louisville, Marquette, Memphis, Rice, South Florida, SMU, TCU, and Tulane are all former members, among others. Nothing about the name is inherently good, but through sheer stubbornness, it’s entrenched itself in pop culture just enough to merit some respect in this ranking.

That leaves the bottom of this list for the absolute worst of the worst. I debated this one a lot, because it does reference the conference’s general location, a point that’s usually enough to make it feel pretty legitimate. But in the end, it’s not enough to make the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) feel any less fake. A lot of the peripherals here are pretty rough—it’s a four-word name and a four-letter abbreviation, the former being unique in D1 and the latter only shared by two other leagues². To make matters worse, it’s got the same problem as the MEAC—it feels like an obvious stand-in for the MAC, perhaps even more so given that you’d pronounce it almost identically if you said it phonetically.

At least “Atlantic” is quite accurate, given that most of its current members are either on the coast or within a few hours. But “Metro”? It’s a league full of private universities that, while occasionally close to the east coast’s metropolises, are usually in their own communities and often rather far away from anything. Members like Quinnipiac (Hamden, CT), Marist (Poughkeepsie, NY), Rider (Lawrenceville, NJ), and Mount St. Mary’s (Emmitsburg, MD) don’t really support that name. To make matters worse, that extra adjective on the front is completely unnecessary—nobody has claimed Atlantic Athletic Conference yet! They should’ve just gone with that.

So: the takeaway from all of this? Never try to be original. It’s a frustrating and confusing process, trying to come up with a term that accurately represents a small collection of schools that may or may not have size, success, or even geography in common with each other. Just steal somebody else’s idea and tweak it until they can’t sue you, then run with it for a few decades until your sheer longevity forces everybody to respect whatever you went with, no matter how silly or inaccurate it may be. It’s worked for the power conferences, after all!

…nah, I’m just kiddin’. Just be glad you’re not one of the poor folks who get stuck naming these things.

1. They’ve just had it so rough for so long, y’know?

2. I’m counting “Mid-Eastern” as a single word here; the other case is the SWAC with “Southwestern”. I guess technically they should be the SAC, but I don’t think anybody wants that.