Mountain West Conference Seeks Playoff System

March 11, 2009

The Mountain West Conference last week continued its campaign for a college football playoff system by releasing a "proposal for change" which had Bronco Mendenhall, head coach of the Brigham Young Cougars, comparing those downplaying the Mountain West's fight for non-BCS conference schools like BYU to be better represented in the race for a national title to those "same cynics who never expected an African-American to become president . . ."

The proposal, which The Olympian describes as calling for "an eight-team playoff and a less-resistant BCS automatic qualifying process," is expected to meet with very little support from the current heads of the major NCAA football conferences during the next BCS meeting in April, as all attending conference representatives would have to agree to sacrificing a portion of the lucrative financial support and national exposure which currently comes from having a member team qualify for a BCS bowl game.

"Why would conferences agree to a playoff in which they might not get good positioning when they already have good positioning," Jerry Palm, director of CollegeBCS.com tells The Olympian. "And the bowl games generally don't want to be a part of it. Even if you do have a playoff, do you create matchups that are fair? And who's going to go to the first set of bowl games when you have playoffs coming up? Are Utah or Oregon fans going to travel three weeks in a row?"

The presidents of those universities comprising the Mountain West, not surprisingly, are likely to respond positively to such inquiry, especially considering that the proposal released last week suggests that the BCS system as it currently exists -- the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl -- could serve as quarterfinals for a four-team playoff to take place the following week at a yet-to-be-determined location. Winners of the semi-final contests would then move on to play in the national championship in order to crown a true #1 team in the nation.

The plan works within current BCS stipulations - the winners of the SEC, Pac-10, ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and Big East would all be automatic qualifiers into the quarter-final games, while the Mountain West, Western Athletic Conference, Conference USA, Mid-American and Sun Belt conferences would have no automatic guarantee of playing in any one of the four BCS bowls. Instead, each of the non-BCS conference schools would have to qualify for inclusion in the eight-team playoff by achieving a suitable winning percentage in games played against non-conference schools.

The Mountain West's plan seems reasonable enough; still, it doesn't take into consideration one significant factor -- that the conference has yet to sign a deal with ESPN, who will own the rights to television coverage of BCS bowl games effective April 2010. Should the conference not be able to win its fight for introduction of a post-season playoff system in Division IA football, it very easily could find itself either forced to accept "the status quo for another four years," as speculated by University of Wyoming President Tom Buchanan, or be left out of the BCS picture altogether.