Automatic Bid? The Mountain West Needs to Drop the Argument

It’s difficult not to respect what the Utah Utes did this season. They went undefeated. They defeated a top five team in a BCS bowl game. You have to be impressed. I’m impressed. Good for them.

However, the kudos end there.

Today I heard tale of them wanting an automatic bid. I found that to be a bit disturbing since prior to this season, the Mountain West has seldom given anyone a reason to take them seriously.

Most people will point to the 2005 season, when the Utes went to the Fiesta Bowl and trampled the Pitt Panthers. That was a great win for future Florida Gator coach Urban Meyer, who used that win to secure a job at a BCS school with a National Championship opportunity.

But if you look closer, you will see that the matchup was really not on the side of the Panthers.

Pitt, prior to that matchup, was 1-4 against the Mountain West Conference in its history.  Further, Pitt was an unimpressive 8-4 on the regular season, including 4-2 in the Big East with losses to Connecticut and Syracuse. That’s hardly a team worthy of a BCS appearance.

In short, they didn’t exactly match up to the Utes, either on paper or on the field.

It was a Utah win that no one should have been surprised to see, especially with Heisman candidate quarterback Alex Smith at the helm. Utah did what they were supposed to do. They won.

Now, flash forward to this year’s matchup with Alabama, and one big thing stands out: the absence of offensive tackle Andre Smith. John Parker Wilson, normally able to stand in the pocket and throw with ease, was sacked eight times. Glen Coffee, who was averaging 5.9 yards per carry (ypc) on the season, was held to a 0.9 average in the game. A really big difference, I’d say.

I admit that it’s tough to say for sure if the Tide would have won the game had Smith been allowed to play, but it does make you wonder how it might have played out if he had.

As for the possibility that Utah may have beaten Florida, I still have a hard time believing that one. The Mountain West Conference as a whole has a winning percentage of 29 percent against the SEC, including being 0-5 against Florida.

In fact, the only teams in the SEC that the Mountain West has had any success against are Vanderbilt (against whom they are 6-3) and—get this—Alabama (against whom they are now 4-3).

Now, I know better than any college football fan that you don’t play the games on paper, but I also know that a little success in a couple of bowl games does not mean you are on par with the larger conferences. The Mountain West is, for the most part, unable to compete with the ACC (33-50), Pac-10 (187-398), Big 12 (276-543), SEC (44-110), or the Big Ten (31-68)—all of whom have automatic bids.

One conference that the BCS may need to rethink giving a bid to, however, is the Big East. They are a conference that is buoyed by big names like West Virginia, Rutgers, and Louisville, but they have not proven that they are worthy of an automatic bid each year. In fact, if not for the recent successes of Rutgers and West Virginia, I am not certain that the Big East would even come up in conversation.

However, that said, when you compare the conferences, the Mountain West plays a weaker schedule, particularly their out of conference foes. They just don’t seem to schedule the tough opponents, and when they do, they lose far more often than they win. So, the argument for giving the Big East’s automatic bid to the Mountain West ends there for me.

It’s not that I don’t like to see other conferences get a shot at playing a big-time school. I do. Sometimes those “weaker” division schools from those little spoken of conferences can win. However, does that mean that they should now be a permanent part of the discussion? I don’t think so.

You had a great season Utah, and the Mountain West had a nice year with you as their representative. Leave it at that.