According to the BCS, the Mountain West Conference is still number none

July 9, 4:08 PMUtah Sports ExaminerBrian Shaw

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In what has been among the most bizarre stories in recent memory, the Mountain West Conference signed an agreement yesterday to rejoin the BCS, though it was more like MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson had a few guns placed at his head while signing on the dotted line.

Those few guns were the schools in the conference who would have been near financial ruin had Thompson not given his seal of approval.

The Western Athletic Conference followed suit, just hours before ESPN exercised its deadline for both conferences to join--or else.

The “or else” part is the most aggravating, since the mid-major conferences would have potentially lost out on millions over several years and their schools would have coughed up at least hundreds of thousands of dollars per year beginning in 2010 had they not signed on the spot. Funny thing was, the MWC and WAC were the last two so-called mid-majors to sign this agreement, so you know they were kicking and screaming all the way to the big day.

Even for the MWC, which is considered by some to be among the higher profile conferences left out of the BCS equation up until now, being out of the BCS picture was not something they wanted to deal with in the long-term.

Basically, the BCS was the big, bad bully and the MWC and WAC was the puny kid who wanted to keep his lunch money.

In this case it turned out to be a deal worth half of a billion dollars and precious airtime on the ESPN family of networks, according to Gordo at “The Trib”, who basically called the MWC and its schools cowards, but who’s counting, really? The Newzz called the terms of the deal “hush money,” through a private third-party in the Land Of Make Believe, as this paper is wont to do, time and again (and again!!).

The BCS’ about-face came after the MWC and other mid-majors threw a major hissy fit after being punked for X number of years. It all came to a rolling boil after Utah sucker-punched Alabama in the Sugar Bowl and still got diddly-poo, or one (!!!) first-place vote.

This lack of concern, unless you are okay with the fact that Utah--and Boise State before them--got the shaft in the BCS national title voting initially had the attention of anyone with a heart and a pulse.

Once President Barack Obama started talking about it, Congress started looking into the allegations concerning alleged improprieties at BCS HQ. After awhile, and much hand-wringing at places like South Bend, Ind., and possibly other places like Washington, D.C. the BCS finally had their day on the proverbial stand and acted as if they had done nothing wrong, as usual.

In sum, the BCS went before the Senate Judiciary Committee led by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch on Tuesday and basically extended the lesser conferences--in their eyes, anyway--an olive branch, albeit wilted and decaying, like something that sat on a Grecian shoreline for months and had been bombed by countless birds.

Then they handed the branch to the MWC, who plugged their noses and sighed, heading for the nearest toilet.

That olive branch, decayed, rotten, smelling God-awful as it were, was enough for the Mountain West Conference to issue this statement upon the news that they, too, would join the BCS, simply because they had to, else they would be playing all of their games on The Mtn.

In the end, the BCS heard none of the MWC’s requests for change, though they did feign “dialogue” at the annual glad-handing meeting in South Bend in early 2009. What looked like a gesture of good faith actually turned out to be something that made a mockery of the MWC. And this statement, issued yesterday by the MWC on its official Web site, says about as much:

Today, the Mountain West Conference has executed the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) agreement and the attendant rights agreement with ESPN. While the Mountain West has expressed serious concerns with the various fundamental flaws in the current BCS system, our various good faith initiatives to generate reform have thus far not been accepted.
Therefore, the Mountain West believes it has no choice at this time but to sign the agreements. If a conference wishes to compete at the highest levels of college football, and the only postseason system in place for that is the BCS, no one conference can afford to drop out and penalize its football programs and student-athletes.
The Mountain West will continue its efforts for change, including a request for dialogue with representatives of the BCS. Our goal is to ensure the eventual outcome of these endeavors is what our universities and student-athletes need, what the vast majority of American sports fans want, and what is long overdue: an equitable system.