Now a BCS darling, TCU likely to be left stranded on Mountain

By the logic of the bowl season, TCU got hosed but good.

Fortunately, there is no logic in bowl season, so we needn't go there, no matter how appealing another chance to slag the BCS might be.

Still, if you apply basic tavern math (you know, the last guy who buys does the talking) to the first five results, you can easily see that the Mountain West Conference is the finest in all the land, and all other must bow down before it.

Fiesta-bound TCU may reign atop a depleted Mountain West in the near future. (US Presswire)

And from that, you quickly extrapolate the fact that its best team, TCU, will not be playing in the national championship game and. .. well, the outrage just flows, doesn't it?

The answer, of course, is yes ... if you ignore the fact that the Sun Belt is 1-0.

But while Wyoming rose up to smite Fresno State in overtime, BYU dope-slapped Oregon State and Utah put a choke slam on Cal, one suspects that this could be one of those last-hurrah deals for the Mountain West.

And why, you ask? Well, there's Joe Paterno, for one.

Paterno, who would otherwise be prepping his lads for the Citrus Bowl against LSU, has also been thumping the tub for Big Ten expansion. He wants a piece of the action that the SEC, ACC and Big XII already enjoy -- a 12-team conference, two divisions, a championship game, and the money that comes with it. The Mid-American has two divisions and a championship game, but it doesn't have the big money, so we'll ignore it for purposes of today's fantasy.

And if he can't produce those incriminating photos of Notre Dame to force the Irish to give up its golden futon of independence, he'd be willing to take Syracuse, or maybe Louisville, or some other Big East school. When you're trying to bloat your own conference, another conference's property really isn't your concern.

But we haven't gotten to the Mountain West part yet. So here's where we do it.

If the Big Ten jumps, the next (and presumably last) conference in a position to do it will be the Pacific 10, a conference so staid that its reorganization was in 1978. It scooped up the Arizona schools from what was once the Western Athletic Conference, and though there were fleeting rumors once upon a time about grabbing Texas and Colorado, those schools are clearly out of the Pac-10's price range now.

But who would be? Utah and BYU, of course.

Geographically, neither school is any more remote than, say, Washington State. Size-wise, they have the full complement of bells and whistles. Cash-wise, they're swimming in it. So who wouldn't want some of that action?

The Pac-10 has a new commissioner, Larry Scott, who has been charged with breaking molds, cracking skulls and shaking down TV money. Picking off, say, San Diego State or UNLV to fill out the field wouldn't pay the way adding Utah and BYU would -- and really, no other combination works quite as well for Scott's purposes.

So what happens to the Mountain West when Utah and BYU leave? Well, there's Boise State and maybe Fresno State. Maybe it re-invites Hawaii. But mostly, what the Mountain West does is bleed.

We don't offer this scenario as anything other than an acknowledgement that the college football world is in full big-fish-eats-little-fish mode. The big schools may talk about the sanctity of the bowl system, but we all know they're lying just long enough for one of their hirelings to figure out a way to make a playoff system create more money than can be shared by fewer partners. The only visible way to help hasten that process that now is to create uber-conferences like the SEC, ACC and Big XII already have and let the WACs and MACs and Conference USAs ... and yes, the Mountain West, too ... take a hike into the very dark and dangerous woods.

I mean, when a notorious purist like Joe Paterno starts coming off like Leon Trotsky, the signs are clear. The few are about to attack the many for its gems and precious resources, and with all due respect to TCU, the Mountain West's shiniest baubles are the Utes and Cougs. And when they go, TCU will get bounced around again, like it has since the old Southwest Conference folded.

Or maybe it buys back into the Big XII if someone wants it to be the Big XIII. Rapaciousness knows no bounds or mathematical etiquette, after all.

Anyway, this morning, the Mountain West is king of all it surveys, and it's got three gaudy prizes to prove it. That and six bucks will get you a coffee with froth and brackishly sweet aftertaste.

But enjoy it while you can, Mountaineers. The big kids are hungry, and you may not know it yet, but you have that blue plate special look.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.