Hawaii Bowl: Nevada vs. Southern Miss a Preview of College Football's Future

The next time Nevada and Southern Miss meet on a football field after Saturday's Hawaii Bowl, it will likely be as conference foes rather than as bowl game participants.

The Mountain West Conference, into which the Wolfpack is moving next season, and Conference USA, from which the Golden Eagles emerged as champions, are likely to join forces in a 16-team super-mid-major league in 2013, though they may yet do so as soon as 2012.

That all depends on how the rest of the conference realignment circus in college football shakes out. Southern Methodist, Houston and Central Florida are slated to bolt C-USA for the Big East, as are Boise State and San Diego State of the MWC.

Texas Christian, the reigning Mountain West champ, will take its talents to the Big 12.

That would leave C-USA with nine football schools—Alabama-Birmingham, East Carolina, Rice, Marshall, Memphis, Texas-El Paso, Tulsa and Tulane—and the Mountain West with seven—Air Force, Colorado State, Wyoming, Nevada-Las Vegas, New Mexico and newcomers Nevada and Fresno State.

Altogether, they would comprise the first 16-team super-conference in college football, albeit one without any marquee football programs.

Sheer size alone would hardly guarantee a C-USA-Mountain West merger an automatic bid into the BCS, though strength in numbers among the "little guys" of collegiate pigskin will help to apply additional pressure to a system that, if not completely broken, could use a bit of tweaking here and there, at the very least.

Who knows? Perhaps the greater consolidation of teams, and the added TV revenue that comes with it, would level the playing field enough to bring about the sort of postseason that fans and pundits have long yearned for.

And to think, the seeds of a college football revolution could be sewn more than 3,000 miles west of the continental United State, with Nevada and Southern Miss serving as the attendant pioneers.

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