Southwest Conference

Southwest Conference

Formerly	Southwest Intercollegiate Athletic Conference[1]
Association	NCAA
Founded	1914
Ceased	1996
Division	Division I
Subdivision	Division I-A
No. of teams	8 (final), 13 (total)
Headquarters	Dallas, Texas
Region	South Central United States
Locations

The Southwest Conference (SWC) was an NCAA Division I college athletic conference in the United States that existed from 1914 to 1996. Composed primarily of schools from Texas, at various times the conference also included schools from Oklahoma and Arkansas.

For most of its history, the core members of the conference were Texas-based schools plus one in Arkansas: Baylor University, Rice University, Southern Methodist University, University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Texas Christian University, Texas Tech University, University of Houston, and the University of Arkansas.

After a long period of stability and success, the conference's overall athletic prowess began to decline throughout the 1980s, due in part to numerous member schools violating NCAA recruiting rules, culminating in the suspension of the entire SMU football program ("death penalty") for the 1987 and 1988 seasons.

Arkansas, after years of feeling like an outsider in the conference,^[2] left after the 1990–91 school year to join the Southeastern Conference, although they did compete in the SWC in football for the 1991 season. Five years later, the conference precipitously broke up as Baylor, Texas, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech (which had entered in 1956 from the Border Conference) combined with the members of the former Big Eight Conference to form a new league, the Big 12 Conference, while Rice, SMU, TCU, and Houston found homes in less prominent conferences, with TCU and Houston later joining the Big 12 themselves.