The best and most competitive of the non-BCS conferences has traditionally been the Mountain West. This is where Utah became the only non-BCS school to crash the BCS party, with their undefeated season in 2004 and win over Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl.
TCU came into the Mountain West with a bang last season, with only an embarrassing loss at rival SMU keeping it from an undefeated season. The rest of the conference had a hard time dealing with the speed of TCU, and coach Fisher DeBerry unintentionally made a racial issue out of it, as he addressed recruiting in the conference last year. TCU will take advantage of its location in the Metroplex to establish itself as a traditional power in its new league. The Frogs have two grudge matches this season with former Southwest Conference rivals Baylor and Texas Tech. I project the Frogs to win both games.
However, the Frogs have to travel to Salt Lake City. The Utes of Utah will be good again this season, and will hand the Frogs their only loss. The Utes will be forced to settle for a tie for the conference championship, as they will lose in Albuquerque to Los Lobos de Nuevo Mexico.
Projections:
TCU 11-1 7-1
Utah 10-2 7-1
BYU 7-5 5-3
New Mexico 8-4 4-4
San Diego St 6-6 3-5
Wyoming 5-7 3-5
Colorado St 4-8 3-5
Air Force 3-9 3-5
UNLV 3-9 1-7
Back on Saturdays: The Mountain West enters the first year of its new TV contract with CSTV. The schools quickly tired of prostituting themselves for exposure by playing Thursday and Friday night games on ESPN. The Worldwide Leader In Sports wanted to pay less for the new contract, and schedule more games on Thursdays and Fridays. Enter upstart cable channel CSTV. They offered the conference more money, and marquee status on their network. The league will no longer play those Thursday night games on ESPN or ESPN2. CSTV, now a division of CBS, later added some reach for their prime MWC games by placing them on OLN (soon to be Versus). The conference will lose some of the exposure they had on ESPN, but will be fine financially, and will regain a little bit of dignity. Good for them.
Monday, August 28, 2006
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2 comments:
You think TCU will lose the those Utar freaks? Thinking again, John-Boy. I'm calling for an undefeated season for the Frogs and a BCS bowl game - oh yeah!
RiffRamBahZoo!
I didn't say Utah was better than TCU, only that they would beat them. The Frogs were fortunate to beat both Utah and BYU last year. I'd like to see the same thing happen this year, but I'm not counting on it...
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