Since it broke away from the Western Athletic Conference in 1998 and all levels of hell began breaking loose on the realignment landscape, the Mountain West has never quite made the mark as a basketball conference.
Football—the reason pretty much any realignment ever happens—has been good to the Mountain West. Utah and TCU both parlayed stays in the Mountain West into lucrative opportunities in larger conferences, a path likely open to Boise State in the near future should they want to trod it. Football is the business that the people doing the business care about; I’m not naive to that, even if I wish it were different in many respects. The game gets played how the game gets played, and that’s before we ever start playing the games.
Basketball, however. Despite being home at times to programs with significant success at college basketball’s highest levels, the Mountain West has never, in its 24 seasons, put a team in the Final Four. Or the Elite Eight, for that matter. San Diego State has six NCAA Tournament wins, most by a MWC program, and a third of those came in a 2014 run to the Sweet 16. UNLV, as close a thing to “traditional” power as the MWC can currently boast, has one more first overall NBA Draft pick than it has NCAA Tournament wins over the last 12 years (and the first pick was Anthony Bennett, which is nothing to brag about either).