Mountain West, WAC Take the BCS' Pieces of Silver and Run

Just a few days after the monumental Senate committee hearing on whether the BCS violated antitrust law, the WAC and the Mountain West put pen to paper, extending their deal with the BCS. And by "their deal" I mean the "big six conference and Notre Dame deal" that happens to include all other teams by the magnanimous generosity of the entity known as the BCS. Even if, you know, that entity doesn't actually exist.

Yes, the BCS is like Prince, it's name is an unpronounceable symbol. Or a pronounceable curse word. Later this week, I'm going to do a column where we come up with a symbol to represent the BCS for the 2009 season since it doesn't legally exist. But before we can do that, I have to figure out how to unlock the symbol collection on my keyboard. And let's be honest that could take me months.

In the meantime, the real question to ask here is why did the Mountain West and WAC sign the agreement and has it strengthened or weakened their case against the BCS? Proceed, fearless reader.

In 1984, BYU won the national championship from outside a power conference. That year's team was nowhere near as accomplished as last season's undefeated Utah team. Don't believe me? The good Doctor at Yahoo has broken down its season. This was not a team that destroyed all competitors and left all others trembling in its wake. BYU beat four teams that finished the season with a winning record. None of the teams they beat finished ranked in the Top 25.

But in the last 25 years, no team from outside a big six conference has won a national championship. (Although Penn State won in 1986 before they joined the Big Ten in 1990.) Could this ever happen again? I'm going to tie this in as we look at the primary question: What happens if both conferences didn't sign on to join the BCS extension with ESPN?

To begin, they'd forgo the BCS television money in the new $500-million, four-year deal. The five non-big six conferences will receive a combined $13 million or so a year, an increase from the $9.5 million they were getting. So each conference nets in the neighborhood of $2.6 million. Divide that number by nine (the number of members of the Mountain West and the WAC) and you're talking about each school in these two conferences netting about ... wait for it ... $300,000.

300,000!

That's less than Matthew Stafford makes for playing a half for the Detroit Lions. What Ryan Seacrest makes for fifteen minutes of every American Idol.

Additionally, if everything goes perfectly and one of the nine schools in the Mountain West or the WAC nets a BCS berth, they'll get another distribution of around $13 million to share from the BCS.

What am I getting at by using these numbers? This isn't a seismic payout. Particularly if you assume that a non-BCS school will only make it into the BCS once every other year or so. (The odds of a team such as Boise State, Hawaii, or Utah going undefeated, as is essentially required to make one of the BCS bowls, is, at best, even. Likely much lower.) Even as a percentage of the overall football and athletics revenue at a school like Utah, which netted $12.1 million for football and $26.9 million overall in 2007-2008, does that money really make a huge difference? That's a little over two percent additional for football and less than two percent of the overall athletics budget. And while Utah may be one of the most financially strong of the teams in these smaller five conferences, is anyone really joining a breadline without the BCS money? Money, by the way, that didn't even exist 15 years ago.

But it wasn't just the money. The Mountain West and the WAC both felt that if their teams were excluded from the BCS, they'd be doing their student-athletes a disservice. Of course, by accepting the money, they ensured that they were also doing their student athletes a disservice.

The lesson here: It's better to be complicit in the exclusion of your football programs than to withdraw from an unfair system that doesn't allow you to compete for the ultimate prize. Sin of omission, meet sin of commission.

The Mountain West issued this statement justifying its decision Wednesday.

"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 it is the BCS, no conference can afford to drop out and penalize its football programs and student-athletes."

The WAC issued a similar statement. Only they took the additional step of attaching a letter spelling out their disagreements with the BCS extension. Seriously, a letter. An actual frigging letter! Man, ESPN and the BCS must have been quaking in their boots. Especially if it was on really fancy letterhead.

In the end, both rebel conferences concluded that they were more likely to bring about change by taking the BCS money than by refusing the money and playing outside the system. But is that actually correct?

No.

That's true, even if you accept the best argument that can be made on behalf of both conferences' decision: Being a party to the BCS agreement could actually strengthen the Mountain West and WAC's argument that the BCS violates the Sherman antitrust act. This line of thinking, which is no doubt being sold to the Department of Justice as we speak, would follow this path: The BCS is so powerful and corrupt that we can't even avoid participating even when everyone knows we hate it and it treats us unfairly. So we sign this while holding our nose.

But, and this is the flip side to the argument, doesn't taking money from a system that you find to be corrupt and, oh by the way, illegal under the Sherman Act, make you complicit in the crime? I think so. And I think it does something worse; it tells us exactly how much money per year it takes for a school to cede the moral high ground. Well, not actually how much money, we just know that a little over $5 million guaranteed per year to the WAC and the Mountain West is more than enough. In so doing, the conferences are sending their own message: Being right might be it's own reward, but it's better to be wrong and take the cash.

All of this means that the best chip the Mountain West and the WAC could ever toss on the table is removed. Namely, what if either conference had an undefeated team make a run like BYU in 1984? Or like Utah's undefeated run last year but the other teams surrounding them had dropped a few more close games? In any given season, the final two teams are a function of that team's accomplishments and also the season's wacky results. Stanford beating USC ring a bell? Put the undefeated Utah team from 2008 in the mix in 2007, when a two-loss LSU faced off against a one-loss Ohio State. Does Utah make a better case for inclusion in the BCS title game then? Maybe.



More importantly, would the BCS have hell to pay if their ostensible goal, putting the top two teams in a bowl game, didn't even include one of the top two teams in its ranking system? I think so. How valuable would the publicity hell that the BCS reaped then be? Worth more than $13 million total they toss off to the bottom five conferences? I think so again. Can you imagine how gleeful the media would be if an underdog team climbed the rankings without being included in the BCS's vaunted rankings.

It would be a public relations disaster for the BCS. (Even worse than existing in the first place.) The AP could reward a team with a national championship that wasn't even ranked in the top 25 BCS teams. Wouldn't that shake the BCS to its very core? Sure, it's not likely to happen, but the mere threat could be of extraordinary value. As is, that threat is removed for a sliver of the BCS's money pie. Meanwhile the WAC and Mountain West, like Judas, have to make do with slinking into oblivion with their own bags of silver.

What's the weight of a football soul? $2.5 million a year, give or take.