Pac-10 rumblings rattle MWC

It all had been going so well for the Mountain West.

It had started with the recently concluded football season. Check that, it had started with the football season that concluded in January 2009, when Utah busted the Bowl Championship Series for the second time in four years, whipping Alabama, 31-17. Not Alabama-Huntsville or Alabama A&M. Alabama Alabama. Bear Bryant's Alabama. The one that beat the dog snot out of Texas in this year's national championship game.

So what if Texas Christian lost to Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl? No harm, no foul. Leading up to the game, ESPN said the Mountain West was halfway home to receiving an automatic BCS bid. ESPN said that. Not The Mtn. or Versus or the Navy Football Network or Wayne and Garth's public access channel or one of the other obscure networks that Mountain West games are available on, provided the log-rolling contest leading up to them doesn't go into overtime. ESPN. A sports channel that everybody gets.

Then basketball season heated up. For one shining moment, the Mountain West had three teams ranked among the Top 25. Or one more than the vaunted Atlantic Coast Conference had.

That was last week, before the Rebels were getting outhustled to virtually every loose ball. Before they realized how much they missed Derrick Jasper on the boards and on defense.

Before, more important to a nationwide audience, the Pacific-10 Conference had to open its big mouth.

Actually, the Mountain West opened its big mouth first. When last week's basketball poll came out and three Mountain West teams were listed, commissioner Craig Thompson said it was mostly due to the exposure Mountain West teams were receiving from creating their own television network. The fact that the ACC stinks and the Pac-10 stinks really had nothing to do with it.

Two days later, two of the Mountain West's ranked teams were getting less exposure as the Navy Football Network refused to break away from a women's game between Utah and TCU that lasted longer than that "Titanic" movie. Apparently, the technical wizards back in the truck hadn't read the instructions about how to split the screen like they do on "Wayne's World" when Aerosmith and Madonna show up simultaneously. And so it wasn't until the second half that the four households that get CBS College Sports were able to watch how New Mexico was beating the Derrick Jasper-less Rebels to virtually every loose ball.

I am sure the Pac-10 got a kick out of that.

The Pac-10 has no room to talk. Not when you'd be hard-pressed to name one of its members besides California that could beat the Washington Generals in a pickup game, especially if you had to win by two.

But the Pac-10 talked anyway, because when conferences with automatic BCS bids speak, people generally listen -- regardless of how terrible you are in basketball.

So the new commissioner of the Pac-10 mentioned in passing that USC and UCLA and those other eight schools might be interested in expanding its membership at some point in the not-too-distant future. Such as when their current TV deals expire in 2012.

This wasn't the first time the Pac-10 had talked about taking on interlopers because, once upon a time, the Pac-10 was the Pac-8. This would have been just before Arizona was getting pretty good in basketball and Arizona State was getting pretty good in football.

It's hard to say how serious the Pac-10 is about expansion because, as many in the blogosphere and even a couple of well-respected newspapers have pointed out, only Utah of the Mountain West seems to fit the Pac-10 criteria for membership -- pretty good in sports, pretty good in academics, quite a few TV sets in its backyard, no gripes about playing on Sunday. But regardless of what the Big Ten thinks, you can't have a conference with 11 members. So if the Pac-10 wants to have a football playoff game sponsored by Dr Pepper, it would probably go to 12 teams, and the name that keeps popping up is Colorado.

Expansion is a slippery slope that could twist and turn a hundred different ways. Or, in the case of the old Western Athletic Conference, 16 ways. But if the Pac-10 does become the Pac-12, dominoes will tumble. Should Utah go and Colorado follow or Missouri join the Big Ten Plus Two, the collateral damage to the Mountain West will almost certainly be swift and severe, because TCU would bolt for the Big 12 faster than you can say LaDainian Tomlinson.

Yes, the Mountain West could patch things up in football by adding Boise State. But then what do you do after the Tostitos are gone and basketball season begins?

Commissioner Thompson says he has a Plan B should the Pac-10 and others raid the Mountain West, but he won't say what it is. If Plan A was creating a TV network from scratch and I were a Wyoming fan or a Colorado State fan or a fan of the Derrick Jasper-less Rebels, I would be worried.

Very, very worried.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352.