Conference Realignment: Mountain West and C-USA Form 22-Team Super-Conference

College football conference realignment just got a whole lot more exciting and complicated as the Mountain West and Conference-USA conferences announced today that they have reached an agreement to form a 22-team football super-conference.

This new 22-team conference could contain many of the top non-BCS powerhouse programs such as Boise State University.

The new super-conference will cover the entire country from coast to coast, including Hawaii, and span five time zones. There is no time or date for when this merger will be completed, neither has a name been officially announced for the new conference.

Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson said the two conferences wanted to come together instead of waiting around and having each other's top football programs be poached from BCS conferences, according to the Detroit Free Press.

According to ESPN writer Andy Katz's Twitter account, the new MWC/C-USA merger will contain schedule realignment and a conference championship game.

Katz's tweet also mentioned that Boise State and the Air Force Academy spoke to the Big East, but endorsed this merger on Friday.

Whether Boise State joins this new super-conference remains to be seen.

This merger really would hurt the Big East conference, which only has six football members beyond the 2011 season, and are scrambling to add new teams.

It's been reported that the Big East will invite Boise State and other non-BCS schools possibly as early as next week.

The Big East has its automatic BCS bowl bid at stake in all of this conference realignment, and this BCS perk is the only attractive thing about the conference.

Teams like Boise State, who are regularly BCS contenders but do not play in conferences that offer automatic BCS bowl game bids, are likely willing to listen to BCS conferences about having the Broncos join them.

Would this new 22-team super football conference be worthy of an automatic BCS bid?

It should be, and if there wasn't a chance that the conference could compete for a BCS spot Boise State probably wouldn't have endorsed this merger, although that is just speculation.

The Big East is trying frantically to add teams to protect its BCS status and add quality members, and the announcement of this new 22-team football conference merger between the Mountain West and Conference-USA is a major roadblock to the survival of the Big East beyond the next few seasons.

Nicholas Goss is a Featured Columnist at Bleacher Report, follow him on Twitter for the latest sports news and updates.  Follow @NicholasGoss35