Too Late For A Real USA Conference

A real Conference USA is happening!

Last week, word dropped that the Mountain West Conference (or WAC 2.0) and Conference USA agreed to form a football alliance. They hope the move will help solidify both conferences and maybe lead to an automatic BCS bid.

Sadly, this announcement comes too little too late in the conference shuffle.

There's a perceived pecking order in college sports, right or wrong. 

In the last conference shuffle, the ACC poached the Big East who gobbled up the best of C-USA. That's likely going to happen again with newest ACC expansion.

So when the Big 12 lost two members last fall, anyone who remotely follows college football knew at some point the Big 12 would make a push to get back to 12, the minimum number needed to hold a conference championship game. The conference appears to be losing even more members, so will likely push to add more.

A year ago, I suggested the WAC and C-USA should merge, creating an All-American conference stretching from the Carolina coast to Hawaii. That move would have gotten the schools ahead of the eight ball.

More than adding to the collective bargaining power to lobby for a BCS spot, a merger a year ago would have provided stability. It is a lot easier for a 18-team conference or alliance to survive members jumping ship than a nine team conference.

At this point, the 22-school football alliance between MWC and C-USA feels like a last gasp to stay relevant. 

Next year, the MWC will add three so-so football schools, but two of its best schools (Air Force and Boise State) could jump ship. Same goes for the best football schools in C-USA. Central Florida, Houston and SMU all have reportedly received invites to the Big East.

There's too many variables to write this merger off at this point. But with the best schools likely to move up the ladder, it's hard to imagine this experiment working out any differently than the 16-team WAC.

The main reason the mega WAC broke up, was because the four time zones and 3,900 miles separating Hawaii from Texas was too much of a travel burden for its members. 

College football is big business and big money, so this could work out. Only time will tell, but both conferences are playing catch up. That's a bad place to be.