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Should Mountain West Teams Play BYU This Year?
Help out a former conference league mate?
Contact/Follow @JeremyMauss & @MWCwire
Cougars need some help
The college football season is gonna get weird and that could be fun, and this is still assuming we will have a college football season. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have canceled its non-league games for a lot of schools.
One school that has been hit the hardest, outside of Hawaii, is former Mountain West team BYU. The Cougars have lost five games this year and could lose more as they also have Missouri which seems destined to be a loss. That would cut its season in half to six games.
BYU is a team that being an independent to struggle to find games this year to fill out a full schedule and what that looks like is uncertain. Odds are that these conference-only arrangements expand to more leagues and possibly to all of college football.
A nine-game set up seems likely as that is a good number of games for each conference to play enough to determine division winners and then have a conference title game.
A way that BYU could fit into the Mountain West would be if their standards for testing and other protocols are similar to each other. Distance has nothing to do with playing games but being on the same page regarding player and staff health.
This is where the Mountain West could help out BYU and if we are being honest, getting the Cougars on the schedule is a bump in TV ratings and a solid opponent.
There are plenty of fans of Mountain West schools who would like to tell the Cougars off but this could be an opportunity for both sides.
BYU already has three Mountain West teams on the schedule with Boise State, San Diego State, and Utah State. Getting six more teams should not be that hard.
There is a straightforward way and a creative way to make this work. The straightforward way is to have BYU fill in the gaps with six other Mountain West teams.
That schedule could look like and the dates are clearly tentative and we will match up with other Mountain West teams.
Plus, we are on the assumption that all leagues will be playing each other exclusively and the season starts the second week in September and adding a week in December.
- 9/12 – Wyoming
- 09/19 – at Colorado State
- 09/26 –
- 10/02 – Utah State
- 10/10 – at Nevada
- 10/17 – Fresno State
- 10/24 –
- 11/06 – at Boise State
- 11/14 – San Diego State
- 11/21 –
- 11/28 – at UNLV
- 12/5 – San Jose State
All of the weeks above would fit into the schedule except the final two weeks would take some tweaking but not all that much.
Temporary Conference Member?
The more extreme idea comes with BYU coming in as a one-year member of the league and join the Mountain Division. This would create a 13-team league but it can totally work with a nine-game schedule.
This would not change schedules all that much since the conference normally plays eight games with six divisions and two cross-division games. This would not impact the current schedules. Having BYU join the Mountain Division, those teams would play its same schedule plus add the Cougars to get to nine. The West Division would either add BYU and one more Mountain Division to get to nine overall.
This would mean that the Cougars could play for the Mountain West title. That scenario would be beyond weird but why the heck not for just one year since COVID-19 is making anything but normal.
People won’t like it but why not do something out of the box and if this could actually work, maybe it will mend the fences even more between BYU and the Mountain West to have a better relationship.
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