It's a bit late in coming, but how about a nice pat on the back to KJZZ-Channel 14 for its high-school football coverage this season?

Week in and week out, the games were professionally produced and announced. Not ESPN quality, but better than a number of college games we saw on The mtn., Altitude and sometimes even FSN.

And the back-to-back-to-back (almost) coverage of the 3A, 4A and 5A title games was outstanding.

This is also the time of year when it's a treat for local fans to have free, over-the-air coverage of the local college basketball teams. This week alone, we had BYU at Weber State on Wednesday and Saturday's Utah State-BYU game in the EnergySolutions Arena.

Not only is it nice to see the Wildcats and Aggies get more airtime (the results of the BYU-WSU game notwithstanding), but those games are about as good as it gets for Cougar fans. Not only are they available locally on Channel 14, but they're available nationally on BYUTV.

BYUTV is available in about 20 million more homes than CBS C. And, while we don't have any firm figures on how many DirecTV subscribers have The mtn., BYUTV is certainly available in 40 million-plus more homes than The mtn.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM is that if you get more money from television contracts, you can field a better college football team.

Well, Notre Dame makes a reported $9 million per year from its contract with NBC to televise all of the Fighting Irish home football games.

Meanwhile, each of the nine Mountain West Conference teams makes about $1.3 million from their TV deal with The mtn./CBS C/Versus for all sports, not just football. (Notre Dame and the rest of the Big East get money for their basketball packages, etc.)

And then there's the Western Athletic Conference, which has been making only about $111,000 per team for its deal with ESPN. (That goes up to about $445,000 next season.)

At the moment, the Mountain West Conference has three teams in the top 18 of the BCS standings — No. 6 Utah, No. 11 TCU and No. 18 BYU. The WAC has No. 9 Boise State.

Notre Dame, 6-6 — which will make more than six times as much money from football alone as the Utes, Horned Frogs, Cougars and Broncos combined will make for all sports — is nowhere to be seen.

What's not fair is that if Notre Dame was having the kind of season that Utah or Boise State is having, it would be playing for the national championship. For that matter, Notre Dame might still be in the running if its record matched BYU's or TCU's.

And how is it fair that, earlier this season before the Cougars lost to the Horned Frogs, they were being mentioned as at least a dark horse for No. 1. But nobody seems to be talking about Utah that way. Not on ABC or CBS or ESPN or anywhere else.

I'm not saying Utah is the best team in the nation. But I haven't seen anybody prove yet that the Utes aren't worthy of contending.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com