In 2005, Florida Atlantic became a football-only member before joining for all sports in the 2006-07 academic year. In 2004, Troy University became a football-only member before joining for all sports in the 2005–06 academic year. Another Big West school, Utah State University, was added as a football-only member in 2003, then departed in 2005 with Idaho and New Mexico State for the Western Athletic Conference (WAC). These new members gave the Sun Belt seven football playing members in their first season, as Arkansas State and Louisiana were already full members which sponsored football. The conference did not sponsor football until 2001, when the league added former Big West Conference members New Mexico State University and the University of North Texas and former Ohio Valley Conference member (an FBS Independent on football) Middle Tennessee State University as full members (all three of them joined a year earlier for all sports in the 2000-01 school year) and added FBS Independent University of Louisiana at Monroe and Big West member University of Idaho as football-only members. The Sun Belt Conference headquarters are currently housed at the Caesars Superdome. Louisiana Tech departed after the 2000–01 academic year. Florida International University joined the Sun Belt in 1998, and the University of Denver was added in 1999. Lamar, Texas–Pan American, and Jacksonville departed at the end of the 1997–98 academic year. Ĭentral Florida left the league following the 1991–92 academic year due to a dispute over television rights, among other reasons. In 1991, the league first began to explore the idea of sponsoring football. Although the American South was the larger conference, the merged league retained the Sun Belt name. ![]() ![]() The Sun Belt, including incoming member in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, then merged with the American South Conference, made up of Arkansas State University, Louisiana Tech University, the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), the University of Texas–Pan American (now merged into the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), New Orleans (re-joined), Lamar University, and the University of Central Florida. New Orleans competed as an independent before joining the newly formed American South Conference in 1987.Īfter the 1990–91 basketball season, all members of the Sun Belt, except Western Kentucky, South Alabama, and Jacksonville, departed for other conferences. New Orleans was forced out of the league in 1980 due to its small on-campus gymnasium that the conference did not deem suitable for conference competition. Over the next ten years the conference would add Western Kentucky University, Old Dominion University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Virginia Commonwealth University. The Sun Belt Conference was founded on August 4, 1976, with the University of New Orleans, the University of South Alabama, Georgia State University, Jacksonville University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the University of South Florida.
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