Waiting game for MW bowl scenarios
FORT COLLINS» The conversations started a month ago, and each week, they seem to begin from scratch again. Welcome to the ever-changing bowl outlook for the Mountain West.
“As often is the case in this bowl landscape, there’s not a lot of hard and fast, this team is going there, this team is going there,” MW deputy commissioner Bret Gilliland said. “It’s who’s the pool, who’s in the mix and how do we get them placed?”
The thought process held at the beginning of last week came crashing down in a hurry, as 11 more teams became bowl-eligible, some of them unexpected. That brought the number of bowl-eligible teams to 70, and there are 78 spots available.
Four more are guaranteed to join the mix this weekend. The Pac-12 has a pair of 5-6 matchups (Colorado vs. Utah and Cal vs. UCLA), with one each in the Big 10 (Purdue-Indiana) and Conference USA (Middle Tennesse-Old Dominion). That leaves 11 more five-win teams playing games, one of them UNLV, facing rival Nevada.
If UNLV wins, that gives the Mountain West seven bowl-eligible teams and only five guaranteed tieins. So for the past month, Gilliland and the conference have tried to stay ahead of the game, but it’s nearly impossible.
“You want to play all the scenarios out, but you don’t want to get too wrapped up in the axel because there’s still two weeks left,” he said.
All the questions will be answered the afternoon of Dec. 3, but until then, all sorts of combinations are being considered.
The conference has no real pecking order when it comes to the bowl games with which it holds affiliations. The Las Vegas Bowl picks first, but it doesn’t have to take the champion. The league can then turn to the Cactus Bowl if there’s an opening, but even Gilliland said that is unlikely this year. There is an agreement with the Foster Farms game, which also looks like a longshot.
The trio of the New Mexico Bowl, Famous Idaho Potato Bowl and Hawaii Bowl are all even, and then comes the Arizona Bowl. Recently, the league has built a relationship with the Frisco Bowl, where an American Athletic Conference team will face an opponent from the MW, the MAC or CUSA.