A roller-coaster week in college football realignment has left the University of Hawaii … OK? For now at least?

I can’t help but hedge that, lest I risk jinxing it — even though I don’t believe in jinxes — because just a week ago, things looked dire. To recap:

>> Sept. 23 started with Hawaii hoping desperately that the Pac-12 would pick it to join Mountain West defectors Boise State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Colorado State when they join Washington State and Oregon State in the league in 2026.

>> The first news that day was that four other Pac-12 targets — Memphis, Tulane, South Florida and UT San Antonio — affirmed their commitment to the American Athletic Conference. This was bittersweet for UH. It took out of the running some of the teams Hawaii was competing with for a spot in a restocked Pac-12, but it also made it more urgent for the Pac-12 to land some of the Rainbow Warriors’ remaining conference peers, such as rival UNLV and Utah State.

>> Sure enough, later that day, Utah State announced it was joining the four MWC teams that had announced their departure for the Pac-12 on Sept. 11. That dropped the MWC below the eight schools needed to qualify as a conference, and with the Pac-12 also one short, UNLV would be pivotal.

>> How urgent was the situation? The next day, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, himself a former UH football player and coach, put his weight behind the effort to get UH into the Pac-12, announcing he had put together a group of insiders (or former insiders) to lobby on the school’s behalf.

>> That same day, the Pac-12 said it would sue the MWC to have the $50 million plus in poaching penalties it agreed to in writing dismissed, calling them an antitrust violation. The claim was that the conference had only agreed to the penalties when it was desperate to fill its football schedule and had no leverage against the MWC.

>> Conference realignment news subsided for a day before UH and the other six remaining football members of the Mountain West (UNLV, Air Force, San Jose State, Nevada, Wyoming and New Mexico) announced Thursday that they had committed to sticking together through 2032. (This came only after the Pac-12 told UH in effect, “thanks but no thanks,” according to Hawaii AD Craig Angelos.)

They also announced the splits on the tens of millions in exit fees and poaching penalties they were set to receive from the departing schools and the Pac-12. UNLV and Air Force, which had turned down overtures from other conferences (Pac-12 and AAC), got the biggest chunks.

That’s where things stand today, with both the Pac-12 and Mountain West one school short in football of qualifying as a conference. The Pac-12 is also one short in other sports, while the MWC is two schools short because Hawaii is a member in football only.

If Hawaii left the Big West in other sports to become a full MWC member, the conference would need, obviously, just one more school, but Angelos said Thursday that the MWC has not made that request.

A look around the country tells you the options for expansion for either conference are not great, given that the AAC teams are already out of the picture. Sacramento State announced Thursday that it will build a stadium in hopes of joining the Pac-12. If that’s not sobering for what’s left of that once-great conference, I don’t know what would be.

The Hornets play football in the Big Sky Conference in the Football Championship Subdivision. They’ve posted a few nice wins over FBS teams over the past 15 years, and there’s been talk about a move up in subdivisions for a while, but Washington State and Oregon State clearly already view themselves as lowering themselves in who they’ve resorted to bringing in.

I think it’s that unwillingness to accept their place in the new world order of college football that will ultimately cost them. The Mountain West bylaws reportedly allow for dissolution of the conference if nine of the 12 members vote for it. So if they’d expanded their circle of invites from five MWC schools to to nine (or even just eight, since that would’ve pushed Air Force to take a deal with the AAC), they could’ve eliminated the exit fees and poaching penalties (which for five schools total in the neighborhood of $140 million).

They could’ve added UNLV and Nevada as travel partners, which fits in with the way the Pac-12 had been for many years (USC/UCLA, Cal/Stanford, the Oregon, Washington and Arizona pairs) and also taken San Jose State to pair with Fresno or UH for its home games that stand alone in late-night TV time slots and its bowl game (or even taken both schools). They’d have a conference of 11-12 teams and no money to pay out. They’d take a hit having to split revenue among more teams, but maybe they were counting on their Hail Mary lawsuit to get out of paying poaching penalties.

There’s irony there. WSU and OSU view the Pac-12 as a powerful enough brand — even without almost any of the schools that gave the brand that power — that everyone should want in on their terms and that they must keep it exclusive. But at the same time they are presenting themselves as victims of the big, bad Mountain West.

Hawaii wound up saved by those schools’ inflated sense of self.

Now with the MWC teams committed to each other, the most likely outcome seems to be a merger, resulting in 14 teams for football and 13 full members … if everyone involved can swallow their pride.

———

Reach Sjarif Goldstein at sgoldstein@staradvertiser.com.