Conference keeping its fans guessing

Welcome to Uncertainty Central, otherwise known as Mountain West Conference football.

More than the annual preseason jitters of "how's my team gonna fare this year," questions run rampant in the Mountain West.

Will an MWC team earn the new, coveted at-large BCS berth with a No. 12 ranking or by finishing ahead of a BCS conference champion? And if a team like TCU, BYU or Utah has that BCS berth all but wrapped up going into its regular-season finale, will the underdog opponent roll over and play dead "for the good of the conference" and a big payday for the league?

If the Mountain West wants to prove it can play with the BCS big boys, why isn't it? Of the MWC's three-dozen nonconference slots, only 11 — 12, if you count Air Force vs. Notre Dame — are against BCS conference foes (four vs. the Big 12, two each against the Pac-10 and ACC, and one each against the Big Ten, SEC and Big East).

Doesn't the Mountain West meeting the Western Athletic Conference in 11 games this season seem like the football equivalent of basketball's "Bracket Buster" matchups?

Why is the MWC playing a total of six I-AA opponents, including Weber State, Idaho State and Northern Arizona? What, was Southern Utah unavailable or demanding too big a payout?

Isn't labeling CSTV- and the mtn.-televised games as "national" and "regional" broadcasts a stretch? People outside the Wasatch Front, Colorado's Front Range and Albuquerque are going to assume CSTV is a computer science station and the mtn. is the Mother Teresa Network.

And what's up with the period after the mtn.? After getting used to the merged-word trend of PowerPoints and WordPerfects, now I have to deal with an errant dot?

Will the Mountain West on CSTV turn out like the 1984 BYU-Pitt game being the inaugural live telecast by some fledgling station called ESPN? Or like ESPN's tractor-pull and arm-wrestling competitions?

Wouldn't Air Force prefer attention given to football successes instead of the glare of the Academy's past sexual-assault and Christian-coercion controversies, coach Fisher DeBerry's ill-advised '05 comments and an assistant hitting a player in summer practice? And will the option-minded Falcons go back to being "bad to the 'bone" rather than again force an aerial attack?

Given the ongoing Middle East conflicts, isn't BYU's marketing slogan of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" a little tacky? (But since the Cougars started it ... what happens if no WMDs are found? Or if it all blows up in their face?) And will 2006 mark the Cougars' first winning season since 2001 and first win over a ranked foe since mid-September 1999?

Has Colorado State learned how to stop the run?