ESPN Independents and Others Blog

Posted by ESPN.com's Graham Watson

Even though Utah coach Kyle Whittingham was in middle-of-nowhere, Texas, on Monday, he was aware of the Mountain West's push for early acceptance into the BCS.

And he wasn't surprised.

The journey to a proposed meeting between Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson and BCS commissioner John Swofford was something Whittingham and his Utes put in motion on Jan. 2, after they defeated Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.

"We've got to keep banging at the door," Whittingham said. "There's no reason, in my estimation, why the Mountain West Conference would not be included in the BCS automatic qualifying conferences particularly with what we did this year."

The Mountain West Conference knows that entrance into the BCS for the 2009 season is out of the question. The meeting between Thompson and Swofford -- if it happens -- would not address that. Rather, it would address the current four-year evaluation period all conferences are under through the 2011 season and whether four seasons was set in stone. If the Mountain West sends another team to the BCS next year or the year after, and topples another perceived football giant, could there be enough of a case to allow early entrance to the BCS? Mountain West representatives said that the presidents and chancellors of the nine Mountain West institutions want to know if there's anything that can be done before 2012 to get into that prestigious group.

It's a question San Diego State athletic director Jeff Schemmel said has been asked at nearly every athletic directors meeting for the past couple of years. The Mountain West has had at least one team in its conference with double-digit wins every year since the conference began, except for its inaugural season in 1999. Since the 2003 season, the Mountain West has had at least one team finish in the AP Top 25. Four times during that span the conference has had a team finish in the top 15 and twice a team has finished in the top four.

"I can't remember a meeting where we haven't talked about this and how we might position ourselves better for the gaining of that automatic berth," Schemmel said. "We always discuss it. Some of those discussions center around the actual campaigning for an automatic berth the other is making our conference good enough so we can earn that under the current formula."

The conference has been criticized for not being good enough as a whole while petitioning for its place among BCS automatic qualifiers. There's no doubt that Utah, BYU and TCU have carried the conference for the last half of this decade and teams such as San Diego State and UNLV have consistently been at the bottom. But some teams in the conference are trying to rectify that by bringing in new coaches -- Dave Christensen (Wyoming), Mike Locksley (New Mexico) and Brady Hoke (San Diego State) -- with track records as offensive gurus, good recruiters and rebuilders of struggling teams.

But looking at several conferences around the country, many of them are top heavy. The Mountain West had one team with just three wins whereas the Pac-10 and Big Ten had multiple teams with three or fewer wins. The Mountain West was 6-1 against the Pac-10 this season and two of those wins came from New Mexico and UNLV, teams that finished in the lower half of the conference.

From Utah's Sugar Bowl win against Alabama, to TCU's win over Oklahoma in 2005, to Utah's win against Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl in 2003, the Mountain West has proved time and time again that it can compete against some of the perceived powers of the BCS.

"I wanted to coach major Division I football and I felt like that's what this league was," said Wyoming coach Dave Christensen, who took the position after serving eight seasons as the offensive coordinator at Missouri. "There's no question this is the most competitive league that's not in the BCS. There are going to be 10-win teams in this league every year. And if they want to wait four years and analyze it, they can certainly do that, but you can just backdate four years and see that there have been teams worthy of being in the BCS.

"You look at other leagues and they get some teams that are playing in BCS games that don't deserve to be there. All I can say is, when the Mountain West teams have been in the BCS, what's their record?"