🏈 7/10 Roundtable - The Mountain West & The BCS

[252BAMA]

7/10 Roundtable - Did the Mountain West give in too easily when it came to agreeing to the BCS system? What should the league do to get what it wants in 2014? It's the Friday topic in the CFN Daily Roundtable Discussion.

http://cfn.scout.com/2/878223.html

 

[TerryP]

Matthew Zemek has an interesting thought in today's discussion:

3) The head honchos of the Pac-10, Mountain West, and the WAC need to find ways to promote football in the Pacific and Mountain time zones. They should create an event called the “Western Football Classic.” Credit for this idea goes to CFN reader Kelly Velayas, but I’m tweaking it. With the woefully ineffective Tom Hansen departing as Pac-10 commissioner, football fans in California and Oregon need to make their voices heard in Walnut Creek (the California town where the Pac-10’s offices are located), as a new boss prepares to run the league.

Mr. Velayas proposed that on the first weekend of December, the Mountain West Conference champion should play the Western Athletic Conference champion on a neutral field, with the winner going to the Rose Bowl against the Pac-10 champion. When the Rose Bowl’s TV contract with ABC expires, that idea might have legs, but the longstanding tie with the Big Ten could very definitely stand in the way of such a plan.

My recommended solution? Make the Western Football Classic a two-game event on the first weekend of December involving four seeded teams with a provision for no rematches of regular-season games. Have the champions of all three leagues—the Pac, the MWC, and the WAC—participate. Then invite the best second-place team in the three leagues (based on a certain set of criteria and/or rankings) as a wild-card entry. Play one game in Denver every year—for the Mountain time zone fans—and one game in a rotation of suburban Phoenix (Glendale or Tempe), Los Angeles and San Francisco for Pacific time zone fans. If the Western Football Classic had made its hypothetical debut this season, what would the landscape have looked like on the first weekend of December?

Game 1, Phoenix, Friday, 8 p.m. Eastern: No. 1 seed USC (Pac-10 champion) vs. No. 4 seed TCU (at-large).

Game 2, Denver, Saturday, 4:30 p.m. Eastern: No. 3 seed Boise State vs. No. 2 seed Utah.

ABC, CBS, Fox Sports Net, and ESPN would have all loved to broadcast one or both of those games. Tell me that kind of event wouldn’t match the Big 12 and SEC title games in terms of popularity… It makes too much sense. Pick up the phone and dash off a fax or e-mail, and see what might happen five years down the line.