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DEKALB, ILLINOIS—-

I’ve covered enough conference realignment press conferences in my career to have a decent understanding of how they typically go. The band and the cheerleaders file into the basketball arena, with the university president, athletic director, and new conference staff. There are uniforms with the new conference patch, plenty of posters with the new conference logos, and everybody gets in front of the microphone to talk about how thrilled they are to be in this new league.

And all of that happened last week, at the press conference announcing that NIU will join the Horizon League, starting on July 1, 2026. NIU officials were very happy, both to be joining the conference, and because the process to join the conference had finally concluded. The Horizon League was over the moon with excitement, as the entire conference staff, save one graduate assistant, made the trip from Indianapolis to DeKalb. The coaches I spoke to at the event were also happy about the move.

But unlike almost every other realignment presser I’ve covered in my career, the rationale for making this particular move wasn’t obvious. Northern Illinois is about to leave the MAC, a league of midwestern peer institutions where NIU has played for the last 28 seasons, for the Mountain West, a league that shares almost nothing in common with NIU, including time zones.

I’ll be honest with everybody. When I first heard about NIU’s plans back in December, my initial thought was why the hell would they want to do that? There are no mountains in Illinois. Everybody else is trying to cut back on athletic travel. Why on earth would NIU sign up for trips to Wyoming and New Mexico?

I don’t blame anybody else for thinking the same thing. But after talking to NIU AD Sean Frazier, and digging into the numbers a bit more myself….I get it.

First, let’s talk about the Horizon League

The Horizon League, a D-I conference that does not sponsor football, currently has 11 full members. Those schools are Cleveland State, Detroit Mercy, Green Bay, IU Indianapolis (you might remember that school as the artist formerly known as IUPUI. RIP Ooey-Pooey), Milwaukee, Northern Kentucky, Oakland, Purdue Fort Wayne, Robert Morris, Wright State and Youngstown State.

All of those schools are in Midwestern urban areas, or just outside Midwestern urban areas. They all recruit and educate very similar kinds of students. There’s a lot of institutional fit between NIU and these schools, just like there was in the MAC.

NIU believes that while both leagues were centered in the Midwest, the Huskies will save hundreds of thousands of dollars on athlete travel by moving to the Horizon League. There are no more trips to Buffalo (or UMass, who is joining the MAC next year), and more bus trips across the board.

The school’s press release specifically noted how important it was for NIU (less than an hour’s drive from the WI state line), to be in a league with multiple Wisconsin institutions. When I asked NIU president Lisa C. Freeman if Wisconsin was an institutional priority market for the school, she smiled and said, “I know our athletes love cheese.”

Saving a few hundred thousand bucks on athlete travel would be significant to any department, but it’s especially critical for NIU. According to the school’s FY24 NCAA financial filing (which you can view, along with thousands of other documents, via the Extra Points Library), NIU reported just under $30 million in total operating revenues, which is on the lower side in the MAC. NIU also spent a little over $3 million in athletic travel. Knocking $500,000 or so off that figure would represent a very significant savings.

Saving that money (and potential airline miles) for the rest of the department also makes it easier for NIU to stomach the football travel required for the Mountain West move. While the school does expect to spend money on flights to places like Logan and Las Vegas, the increased television revenue from the MWC TV deal, plus increased ticket and gameday revenues associated with playing on Saturday (instead of the mid-week #MACTION games), are expected to more than make up the difference.

Okay, but what does this mean on the field? Or, court?

Saving money is awesome, but nobody tunes into college sports to figure out which department most efficiently deployed their financial resources. They want to win. Does this move help NIU win?

I’m fascinated to see what happens with the school’s men’s basketball program.

If the Horizon League has a national reputation, it’s as a basketball league. As of March 2nd, the Horizon’s Net Rating was actually significantly higher than that of the MAC. While most bracket projections have the MAC champion earning a superior seed to the Horizon champion, going purely by the numbers, there’s not a big gap between the two leagues. The MAC might enjoy a better reputation among casual fans, perhaps due to FBS football or memories of previous MAC March Upsets, but they’re similar leagues now.

Whether that will remain the case in the short-term is interesting…because there’s no nice way to put this. Right now, Northern Illinois men’s basketball flat out stinks.

Now, that’s not entirely NIU’s fault. The top three players from last year’s squad all hit the transfer portal, and almost every other meaningful contributor either graduated or left. Throw in a few injuries and bad assessments, and a regular ol’ bad team suddenly becomes a terrible one. This season, NIU is 5-24, with three of those wins coming against non-DI competition.

For as much as the internet has clowned Green Bay and Doug Gottlieb for being lousy this season, according to KenPom, they’ve been better than NIU this season.

Horizon League commissioner Julie Roe Lach told me that the league is confident that NIU men’s basketball will improve, specifically pointing to improvements and investments the program has made in facilities and staffing. While NIU is confident they can be highly competitive in many other sports right away, their ability to be competitive in the flagship sport of the Horizon League will go a long way towards the public perception of this move.

NIU is trying something us reporters and fans pitch all the time…decoupling football schedules from everything else.

On Thursday, school officials specifically pointed to the Service Academies like Army and Navy as an example for what NIU is looking to achieve…having their football teams play more national schedules (as independents or members of the AAC), while pursuing more regional models for their other programs.

NIU president Freeman also cited her experience at her alma mater, Cornell, which plays hockey in the ECAC, as helping her become more familiar and comfortable with NIU pursuing a multi-conference format.

At the end of the day, NIU will almost certainly be members of more than just the Mountain West and Horizon. Two of NIU’s remaining programs, Women’s Gymnastics and Men’s Wrestling, are not sponsored by the Horizon, and will need new homes. School officials have applied for affiliate status in the MAC (Freeman said the reason those members have not been approved now has more to do with scheduling meetings than it does about the MAC not wanting to approve their application), but if that doesn’t work out, other accommodations will have to be made.

I don’t know how much this strategy can be scaled. NIU was fortunate to both have an invitation from a football league that was willing to provide more money (in the MWC), and the brand and geography to allow them to find other conference affiliation options. School officials confirmed to me that NIU also had conversations with the Missouri Valley Conference, among others. It’s probably easier to pull this strategy off when you’re in the Chicagoland Exurbs, instead of say, South Dakota or Oregon.

If the plan works, NIU is betting that the increased TV revenue from football and the cost savings from the Horizon will allow the institution to better support athlete revenue sharing and competitiveness across the board. That will mean a few strange football road trips, but if the Huskies are playing on Saturdays and competing for league titles, the school is betting that fans won’t mind too much.

If it doesn’t work, then NIU will have thrown away membership in a stable conference for losses in far-flung locales, decreased national relevance, and a basketball team that gets blown out by Wright State and Youngstown State.

I don’t know if the move is for everybody. But in a world where the status quo isn’t going to work out for NIU…I don’t blame the school for taking a big swing and trying something radically different. I don’t think this move will hurt fans or the total competitiveness of their athletic department.

And hey, worse case scenario…the Mars Cheese Castle is directly on the way to UW-Milwaukee. I’m not saying that’s important enough to change your whole conference alignment…but I’m also not not saying that.

Changing conferences requires a lot of benchmarking, so school and conference leaders can understand how one school’s budget lines up with their new conference peers. A great way to quickly get that benchmarking data is with the Extra Points Library. Not only does EPL have thousands of contracts for athletic department vendors, ADs and coaches, it also has years of athletic department budget data, data that you can sort and compare over time, with conference peers, or nationally.

Check out how Extra Points Library can save your organization time and money today!