The Mountain West Conference (MW) is an athletic conference that operates in the Western United States. It is one of the ten conferences that make up the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The MW currently consists of 12 member institutions, all of which are located in the western United States.
The MW was founded in 1999 as a merger of the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) and the Big West Conference. The WAC had been in existence since 1962, while the Big West was founded in 1982. The MW has undergone several expansions and contractions over the years, but it has remained a stable conference in the FBS.