Beginning in the 2026-27 scientific year, the Mountain West Conference announced Friday that it would accept Grand Canyon University as a member. With a college embroiled in constitutional controversies, including over its standing as a not-for-profit organization, which could also expose its NCAA standing, the league hopes to shore up its Pac-12-plundered ranks in doing so.
Grand Canyon’s walk to the MWC, as a non-football-playing representative, comes two weeks after UTEP agreed to join second year as its all-important seventh football constituent—giving the league the maximum number of pigskin participants required to be an NCAA FBS conference.
For the past ten years, Grand Canyon has been on an upward direction both professionally and athletically, according to MWC director Gloria Nevarez in a media transfer. As we work to earn NCAA playoffs requests and contend for regional championships, the addition of the club will increase the competition across the Mountain West.

Grand Canyon, which has been a part of the WAC since it first joined Division I in 2013, received requests for three of the previous four NCAA people’s basketball competitions. After beating Saint Mary’s in the next round, Alabama lost to Alabama in March Madness.
But, for all the Lopes ‘ recent successes on the jury, GCU has faced a number of new challenges in judge, as Sportico has originally reported.
Previously known as Gazelle University, the secret Christian university and its past business owner-turned-marketing services provider, Grand Canyon Education Inc., are now being sued by the Federal Trade Commission, which has accused GCU of being “deceptively promoted” as a volunteer. The FTC notes that 60 % of the school’s yearly income from tuition, housing, food service and its sporty industry goes to the GCE, which is publicly traded on the NASDAQ.
( GCE’s stock, which trades under the ticker# LOPE, dropped 90 cents Friday to finish the week at$ 136.30, down from its 52-week high of$ 157.53 in early August. )
A representative for Grand Canyon told Sportico that the FTC complaints were “nonissue for the Mountain West.”
Nevarez, in a speech, said:” All prospective member organizations are vetted. We are convinced that GCU, like our other recent improvements, coincides with the MW vision and values”.
A king services partnership between GCU and GCE “enables the organization to “disproportionately profit” from the school’s profits,” according to the agency entrusted with consumer protection in an amended complaint filed in September, and it makes it “impractical” for GCU to actually change providers. These factors and others, the FTC alleges, fundamentally undermine Grand Canyon’s assertion that it converted into a nonprofit in July 2018.
The Department of Education determined that Grand Canyon still lacked the “operational test” necessary to qualify for nonprofit status the following year. After Grand Canyon sued the Department of Education, a federal judge ruled in the agency’s favor in 2022. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is currently asking for that decision to be overturned.

While for-profit institutions are allowed to be NCAA Division I members, they cannot serve on the association’s committees, vote or receive direct revenue distributions. The NCAA currently recognizes Grand Canyon as a nonprofit and gave the institution$ 702, 330 in direct distributions last fiscal year.
The Phoenix-based school has filed a lawsuit against the FTC complaint by citing recognition of the organization as a nonprofit by the Internal Revenue Service and the state of Arizona, as well as its institutional accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission.
People who fully comprehend these circumstances are aware that the FTC lawsuit is largely a refutation of the same false claims made by the U.S. Department of Education regarding our legal nonprofit status, according to the Grand Canyon spokesperson statement. ” The Department of Education’s efforts, in coordination with the FTC, are clearly the outlier among objective third parties that have reviewed these claims”.
Following an investigation by the office of Federal Student Aid, the Department of Education fined GCU$ 37.7 million for underestimating the cost of its doctoral programs, which was to the detriment of more than 7,500 former and current students. ( This has been vehemently refuted by the school. )
Grand Canyon reported tuition revenue of$ 1.8 billion for the fiscal year ending in June 2024, and revenue from auxiliary enterprises—including golf, hotel, and its arena—of$ 14.2 million. According to its FY23 tax return, the school’s highest-paid employee was head basketball coach Bryce Drew, who earned$ 1.37 million in compensation, while Drew’s predecessor, Dan Majerle, was paid$ 1 million for what appears to be part of a settlement.
Majerle, the former NBA player known as” Thunder Dan”, sued Grand Canyon for breach of contract in 2020 after being fired without severance. After terminating him, Maharle accused the school, which he had coached at for seven years, of continuing to use his name, image, and likeness.
Although the sides have not publicly addressed the resolution to the suit, which was dismissed a month-and-a-half after being filed, the school also paid Majerle$ 1 million in FY22, tax returns show. When contacted about this Friday, the school declined to comment.
Regarding the pending FTC action, it’s not clear how much the final ruling in the case will have an impact on Grand Canyon’s status within the NCAA, but it is unlikely to hurt its standing as a Mountain West. The MWC bylaws make no mention of the need for an institution to be a nonprofit, but state that each of its member institutions must be an “institution of higher education which includes intercollegiate athletics within its education programs.”
In September, five of MWC’s 12 current schools—San Diego State, Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and, a week-and-a-half later, Utah State—announced that they would be bolting next year to join Washington State and Oregon State in the Pac-12. Subsequently, the Pac-12 sued the MWC over the “exorbitant and punitive monetary fees” it was assessing its defectors, arguing that this constituted a form of illegal price-fixing, despite the fact the schools had agreed to the so-called “poaching penalties”.
That same month, six of the remaining MWC members—Air Force, New Mexico, San Jose State, UNLV and Nevada, along with Hawaii—signed a memorandum of understanding committing to the league while executing a new grant of media rights that would extend from 2026 to 2032.