Wait, What???

The reports have to be a joke, right? There is no way that Conference USA and Mountain West are going to merge for football only and become a 22 team league...right?

That is just insae to think about. I mean, the 16 team Big East basketball conference has a hard time scheduling and those teams play something like 20 league games a year. In football, you play 8 or 9. The scheduling inequality is going to be insane. Not to mention that the league will now span from Hawaii in the West to East Carolina in the East. They have to keep the leagues as separate conferences (or 4 divisions) and allow ECU to play Hawaii only in the championship game, right? Wow. A 22 team league is just nuts to think about.

And yet...somehow it is a brilliant move. The two conferences know that they are going to lose some of their more attractive teams. The Big 12 and Big East are losing their teams to the Pac-12, SEC, ACC and Big 10. They are in survival mode and plan on plucking teams from lesser leagues like C-USA, Mountain West as well as some independents. It is going to happen, so C-USA and the Mountain West decided to launch a preemptive strike. While the remaining members of the Big 12 are unsure what will happen to the league, members of these two leagues know that there will be a league. It might look entirely different in a few years, but with 22 teams, they could lose 10 and still be viable. I think it was a brilliant move.

Ok, so let's speculate a little on who might be gone and who might be staying. If you listen to the rumors, it appears that the Big East will be going after Central Florida, East Carolina, SMU and Houston from C-USA and Boise St and Air Force from MWC. (It seems crazy that the latter four might join a conference called the Big East, but if they all enter together, then again, it could become a national league with two separate divisions.) The Big 12 meanwhile has already swiped TCU and adding SMU and Houston seem like a natural next step.

Assuming those schools leave for greener pastures, that would leave C-USA with 8 teams (Marshall, Memphis, Rice, So. Miss, Tulane, Tulsa, UAB, UTEP) and MWC with 6 teams (Colorado St, Hawaii, New Mexico, San Diego St, UNLV, Wyoming). You could easily move UTEP to the West division and have two 7-team divisions. The reputation may take a hit without Boise St, TCU and BYU (which turned independent last year), but it would certainly be above the Sun Belt and MAC and would arguably be on par with whatever the Big East does (or whatever becomes of the Big 12 if Texas, Tech, Oklahoma and OSU eventually move to the Pac-16).

So yeah, originally it was shocking to read. But after careful consideration, I think this was a smart move (and it allowed me to briefly touch on 15 schools that I normally would not)