Mountain West Conference Could Lose Utah, Gain Kansas and Kansas State

Going into this past weekend, college football fans were actually looking forward to the coming week because of all the breaking news developments that would take place beginning Monday.

Well, Monday has come and it hasn't disappointed.

After all indications that Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State were headed to the Pac-10, Chip Brown of Orangebloods.com has breaking news that they may not be headed anywhere.

The 10 remaining teams in the Big 12 conference have come together and negotiated to keep the conference together. If the majority of the universities agree to do so, there will be a television deal in place that will deliver roughly $17 million to each school.

While that might be big news and might kill all of the buzz that there was going to be a mass exodus out of the Big 12, it seems that the Pac-10 has a lot of work to do now that they're losing out on four of the best teams in college football.

Now, for those of you who are about to jump on me for that last line, I didn't say THE best four teams in college football, but they're among the best.

Now, that being said, all of the sudden the Mountain West could be put in the spotlight, or more specifically, the University of Utah.

According to a source of mine out of San Diego, and one of the writers that covers Kansas has heard the same thing, the Pac-10 will look to Utah to be their next invite to join the conference.

If that happens and Utah jumps from the Mountain West ship, the conference will once again be down to nine members including the newly added Boise State.

The source I spoke to tells me that the Mountain West would look to Kansas and Kansas State to join their conference but if Texas and the rest decide to stay, that would kill that possibility.

So, with the Mountain West at only nine teams, if in fact Utah does jump out west, will they look to other schools to bring the conference up to 10 or could they possibly look to go to 12 teams and split into two six-team divisions?

One possibility, as we've talked about several times before, is Fresno State who already has a rivalry with Boise State from their days in the Western Athletic Conference as well as BYU and San Diego State before those two teams jumped ship and joined the newly formed Mountain West.

They would seem like the natural fit and would bring those rivalries back into play from the old days.

A few other teams you could look at are SMU and Houston from Conference USA. They would both be Texas teams that could begin a rivalry with current Mountain West member, TCU.

There are all sorts of scenarios that could play themselves out today, but all of them hinge on an official announcement from Texas that they do plan to stay in the Big 12.

From there, it's anyone's guess what happens next.