Coloradoan reporters Kevin Lytle and Kelly Lyell breakdown CSU's early signing class. Kevin Lytle, Kelly Lyell
The Mountain West can’t afford to take the kind of dive in national reputation it has taken in men’s basketball, plummeting from the top-rated conference in the country in terms of RPI five years ago, to a one-bid league for the past two seasons.
So, it was good to learn that the athletic directors of 11 of the conference’s 12 football-playing schools met Wednesday in Denver.
Were they talking about eliminating the games nearly every school plays against teams from the lower-tier Football Championship Subdivision each year to strengthen their schedules?
Or eliminating the guarantee games they nearly all play on the road against national powerhouse programs for $1 million to $2 million apiece to supplement their athletic budgets, knowing there’s almost no chance they’ll win?
Or a new reconfigured lineup of bowl games, assuring the conference can match its top teams against the top teams in Power 5 conferences in the postseason?
Nope, commissioner Craig Thompson said Friday.
They were simply going over procedural issues while the recently completed season was still fresh in everybody’s mind, Thompson and two of the participating ADs – Boise State’s Curt Apsey and Wyoming’s Tom Burman – said through school spokesmen. And they basically agreed to keep things as they are.
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There are no quick fixes for the Mountain West, which sent four teams to Bowl Championship Series games from 1998-2013 and has since added schools from the Western Athletic Conference that combined for three BCS appearances.
The conference can’t change the power structure, which has the Power 5 conferences using their increased television revenue and the autonomy they’ve been granted by the NCAA to increase the dominance they enjoy over the Group of 5 conferences, including the MW.
It can’t break the hold the Power 5 has on the four-team College Football Playoff or assure itself of the spot in a New Year’s Six bowl game that goes to the top-ranked team from a Group of 5 conference, a spot the MW hasn’t secured since the CFP’s inaugural season in 2014.
The MW can’t even secure additional bowl berths against teams from Power 5 conferences until the current contracts expire after the 2019 season and new deals are made. The NCAA has placed a moratorium on approving new bowl games, he said, so no new bowls can be certified unless it replaces one of the existing 39.
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The MW, Thompson said, will be able to sign deals guaranteeing six teams berths in one of the 39 current bowl games based on the number of bowl-eligible teams it has had over the past six years. The MW only has five guaranteed slots under its existing agreements and only one of those, the Las Vegas Bowl, matches a conference team against a team from a Power 5 conference – the Pacific-12.
So, rather than locking a conference team into a sixth bowl game to play a team from one of the other four conferences that make up the Group of 5 – the American Athletic, Conference USA, Mid-American and Sun Belt – it might be best to retain the kind of flexibility the MW had this year that allowed a 10-win San Diego State team to take a spot in the Armed Forces Bowl in Fort Worth, Texas, that the Big Ten couldn’t fill.
“The bottom line is ESPN owns a number of bowl games,” Thompson said. “Do we keep ourselves open and be available to fill a spot for them, or do we lock ourselves in?”
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Unless the sixth spot would assure the MW of another postseason game against a school from a Power 5 conference, leave it open.
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The only way the MW is going to raise its profile is by playing and beating schools from Power 5 conferences on a regular basis. So, the conference and its schools should continue to pursue any and all opportunities to do so, as CSU has done in recent years by adding home-and-home series with Arkansas, Vanderbilt, Texas Tech, Arizona and Oregon State. Boise State has scheduled home-and-homes with Florida State, Michigan State, Oklahoma State and Washington State. And San Diego State, which beat Pac-12 schools Stanford and Arizona State this past fall, has added home-and-homes with Arizona, UCLA, Utah and Washington State as well as another round of games against Arizona State.
These aren’t the guarantee games, like CSU and Fresno State played last fall at Alabama, or that other conference schools play on a regular basis to supplement their budgets. These are home-and-home series in which the MW schools get to bring a big-time opponent to their campus that they have a reasonable opportunity to beat.
That kind of scheduling is what made the MW into a basketball power in 2013, with the No. 1 conference RPI in the country. Four MW teams earned at-large bids to the 68-team NCAA tournament that year, matching the Big 12 and Pac-12 and surpassing the Atlantic Coast (three) and Southeastern (two) conferences.
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It’s why, Thompson said, the MW isn’t going to force teams to play their five nonconference games in the first five weeks of the season. As much as that would help balance the conference schedule, which has each school playing every other school in its six-team division each year and three schools from the other division in two-year home-and-home cycles, it would limit options for adding marquee nonconference games.
If Notre Dame, for instance, had a game open up but could only play it in November, he would want an MW team to be able to fill that spot if it chose without the conference standing in the way. Air Force already plays games in October and November against Army and Navy, and both Boise State and Utah State have scheduled future games in October against BYU.
So, the MW can’t make a truly balanced schedule until 2025 or so, at the earliest, anyway.
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There will be new media rights deals negotiated between now and then and possibly some more shifts in conference membership.
Flexibility, as the MW athletic directors seem to prefer, allows the conference and its individual schools to pursue whatever opportunities new opportunities might present themselves.
For now, at least, it’s the best they can do.
Follow reporter Kelly Lyell at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news and listen to him talk CSU sports at 11:35 a.m. Thursdays on KFKA radio (AM 1310) and 10:45 a.m. Saturdays on Denver’s ESPN radio (AM 1600).
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