University of Oregon football coach Mike Bellotti mentioned last year that he didn't think the Cougars of BYU would fare as well as they would inside the confines of the Mountain West Conference, if they had to take on a full PAC-10 Conference slate every season.

Given the fact that Oregon used to be well below the Cougars within the college football organizational hierarchy when coach Bellotti arrived in Eugene nearly 15 seasons ago, I found this statement to be a little obtuse.  

The statement postured by Bellotti is but a microcosm of the overall hierarchy within college football as the CFA alliances utilize this same stance when spewing their superiority poison towards the PAC-10 Conference.

Why would we use the same poison on BYU when we do not like this political sabotage ourselves?

This form of posturing, easilty identified as press oriented smear campaigns designed to gain pollster points or lure potential 5-star recruits, is pure and absolute horse hockey.  

In order to solve the BCS hierarchy, which is full of CFA  segregation, bias and ill will towards our fellow competitors, what we really need is to have some forward thinkers interject the administrative halls of the PAC-10 Conference with some proactive strategies so we can move forward, and out of the cellar of the BCS stratosphere.

This is what smug complacency and an elitist mind set buys you inside the BCS era if you choose to conduct your business in a reactive, as compared to proactive, manner.  

 The MAC Conference, as well as the WAC Conference, has better television packages than the majority of the PAC-10 Conference members:                                                                                                                                    

This past season, when Oregon was embarking on their BCS ascent, a key match-up with Arizona State in week number eight was nearly unavailable to the majority of the nation due to the fact that PAC-10 Commissioner Tom Hansen has been asleep behind the wheel.  

If not for some quick maneuvering over at ESPN, much of the nation would not have witnessed a great game between two Top-10 teams who played perhaps the most important game that weekend.

Taking the high-road, leads to the low road!  

The only conference to play all of its conference members on an annual basis does not gain any style points within the beauty pageant, known as the BCS.

Playing all nine of the PAC-10 Conference members is tough enough, but when you add the non-conference BCS opponents that many of the PAC-10 Conference members must play in order to gain BCS poll style points, there is legitimately only one patsy opponent opportunity on the schedule.

Have you seen the Big-10 Conference opponents this year, or the schools that the ACC, SEC and Big-12 schedule on an annual basis?  Kansas, Ohio State, Hawaii and Virginia Tech have all played schedules that are more than suspect, and they will reside in BCS land come January.  

Someone explain to me again how PAC-10 programs Oregon, Oregon State, UCLA and California are going to be excited to play in their bowl venues this year?  Which brings up the third key point...

The PAC-10 Bowl opportunities are the worst among the BCS Conferences.

This factor may be a little more difficult to solve, because it has to do more with geography than it does anything else.  However, give me a little latitude on this one.  Even if college football continues to reject my BCS Busters Regular Season Playoff Model, the "Conference of Champions" would do the college football world a big Christmas favor if they would simply expand to 12 teams, play a conference championship game, and open up the Rose Bowl to the teams that actually deserve to be there.

I am not saying that the PAC-10 or the Big-10 do not deserve to play here.  What I am saying is that this year, like many other seasons, with Illinois coming to Hollywood for the Rose Bowl Parade, wouldn't we be better served if this spot was actually opened up to a team like Missouri, who is obviously better than Illinois given the fact they beat the Illini in week number one?

Given the beating that the PAC-10 faces within the media every year, maybe we would actually earn some style points and poll positioning favoritism if we actually unchained the locks to the Rose Bowl and expanded the conference so we wouldn't actually have to play what should be another conference member in BYU or Utah in a bowl game, because we get absolutely thrashed in the media every time we lose to these schools and gain zero caloric benefit when we beat them in the polls.

In everything we do, we leave footprints in the sand.

When Notre Dame signed their historic contract with NBC Television it sent shock waves throughout the college football world.

Knowing full well that absolute power within the game was connected to television, the strongest conferences had to have to greatest reach.  It came down to television sets.  The more sets a conference could reach, the greater the reach, the greater the marketing appeal.  This has proven true each time a conference has moved forward, thus leaving footprints for the other teams to follow.

The Choice is as simple today as it was back then.  Move forward or get left behind.  The PAC has been stuck in neutral long enough don't you think?

The ripple affect of the PAC-10 moving to the PAC-12 would provide immediate incentive for the stronger schools within the non-BCS family to think proactively for themselves.  The three strongest non-BCS Conferences are in fact the Mountain West, WAC Conference and C-USA.

Tonight's thriller on the islands involving East Carolina and Boise State will prove to be every bit as exciting, well played and ingenious on the coaching end as West Virginia and Oklahoma, or Virginia Tech and Kansas.  I'm not sure Missouri and Arkansas will be as well played or provide as much drama as the game we witnessed tonight.

However, the one thing missing is the fact that the game didn't mean anything.  What if this was played as part of the BCS Busters Regular Season Bracketed Playoff Model?

The newly created Rocky Mountain Conference could very well look like the following:

Rocky Mountain West
Hawaii
Boise State
Fresno State
Air Force
Nevada
Colorado State
Wyoming

Rocky Mountain East
TCU
UTEP
Southern Mississippi
Tulsa
Rice
Houston
Memphis

SMU would remain with C-USA, while East Carolina would move on to the Big-East Conference, along with Appalachian State, Navy and Army.  This would bolster the Big-East.

And if you think a team like Boise State or East Carolina doesn't belong with the big boys...think again.  Last nights game between UCLA and BYU involved a number of drops by the Bruins.  So much so that it reminded me of the infamous SEC games a couple of seasons ago between not only LSU and Alabama (6-3), but LSU and Auburn (7-3).  

Of course, those games are always hyped by the SEC speed on defense, but then of course, if we look at the scores this year, it appears there isn't a bit of defense being played in the SEC.  Now it is the Speed on offense and the influence of the Spread Offense getting the hype.

I have witnessed more drops within the BCS Conference games between the juggernauts than I have between Boise State and ECU, Cincinnati and Southern Miss, or Utah and Navy.  

The proactive stance that the PAC-10 could take upon itself would leave such a Sasquatchian footprint in the sand that others would surely follow...and this would be the tsunami needed to flatten the barriers of bias and orchestrated pollstering and media slander that prevents college football from moving forward.

The Clock is Ticking!  

All I want for Christmas is some forward thinking PAC-10 Administrators.

Blog post found at ncaa-schedule.com

Merry Christmas!