Mountain West creates divisions, championship game and tries to position itself for the changing college football landscape

With the Mountain West securing the recommitments of Boise State and San Diego State, who were heading to the Big East just a few months ago, the conference felt comfortable announcing the formation of divisions and a league championship game.

However, unlike the Big Ten, which tried to get fancy with it division names, the Mountain West kept its simple by naming its divisions “Mountain” and “West.”

Catchy.

Here’s what the divisions look like:

Mountain Division
Air Force
Boise State
Colorado State
New Mexico
Utah State
Wyoming

West Division
Fresno State
Hawaii
Nevada
San Diego State
San Jose State
UNLV

Each team will play five inter-divisional games and three cross-divisional games each season. The inaugural title game will be played on Sat. Dec. 7, 2013 at the home of the highest division winner according to the BCS standings. It’s unclear which method the conference will use when the BCS standings are no longer used.

Considering the pilfering the Big East has done to Conference USA and Conference USA has done to the Sun Belt, and the disintegration of the WAC, the Mountain West is the strongest of the nonautomatic qualifying leagues, but still not as strong as it was a few years ago with TCU, Utah and BYU. While Boise State will probably make some noise in the BCS Standings, it will be interesting to see how highly this league is thought of when college football moves to a playoff in 2014.

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