Mountain West announces Division names, Championship Game

By Kevin Kelley -

MWCThe Mountain West has announced their division names, Mountain and West, and also set their inaugural football championship game.

With Boise State and San Diego opting to remain in the conference, the MWC will have a 12-team alignment beginning with the 2013 season. That number also enables them to split into two divisions and stage a championship game.

Listed below is the new alignment for the Mountain West Conference:

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 an 8-game conference schedule, which includes games against every other team within their division (five games) and three teams from the opposite division.

The inaugural MWC Football Championship Game will be played on Saturday, Dec. 7, 2013. It will be a match-up of the Mountain and West Division winners and will be hosted by the team ranked highest in the BCS.

Football Schedules

Comments (24)

Love that. Better than just West…. A blogger here wanted Casino division Cha-ching $¥£€

glad they got it done. now hopefully schedules will be out soon. i wanna see boise-nevada and boise-fresno st, but they will probably miss out on one of those teams the first two years…

4th??? Are you kidding? We pretty much have all of our team back plus several promising new kids ready to step up..SJSU has a lot better depth then ever before and will definitely challenge Boise State for the MWC title..and Fresno State? Puhlease…..that is like Georgia trying to beat Alabama,they may be in the same league but not on the same level.

Just go ahead and add Idaho and New Mexico State for pete’s sake. NMSU is Mtn, Idaho in West.

OK, now that all of that is decided and makes good logical sense, why would it take the MWC 3 months to get their schedule together? The only team scheduled to play on Dec. 7 is Hawaii and they can move their game with BYU to one of two open dates in September or one later in the season. That should be easily done and then everything else can fall in place. Craig Thompson … let’s get a move on.

anyone ever think that the MWC should invite North Dakota State? Craig Bohl is doing a great job up there, just got a long-term contract and has back-2-back national championships at the FCS level.

Under Bohl NDSU is 6-3 vs FBS opponents.

No—Tulsa or BYU or SMU. No UTEP. No Houston. No NDSt. No UC Davis. Nonthing but Tulsa, BYU, and/or SMU….

Really love the new look MWC with a championship game, But have a question… A team in the MWC schedules 13 games with the Hawaii exemption. Then they play in the MWC championship – game 14. Then they play in a bowl – game 15. Is that allowed?

yes, it’s allowed. you can have 13 regular season games, 1 conference championship game, and one bowl game equal to 15 games.

with the 4 team playoff starting in 2014, most teams that make the national championship game after winning their semifinal game will end up with 15 or even possibly 16 games (if playing hawaii) (12/13 reg season + 1 conference championship + 1 semifinal game + 1 national championship game)

so there is nothing wrong with 15 games.

I’m curious to see how this will work out with television dollars. The divisions make pretty good regional sense, and while the strength from top to bottom is a little bit off (Boise may have it a bit easy and SJSU has to work especially hard to prove themselves), I think this might be one of the best outcomes the will maximize the opportunities to get games televised nationally. Now I hope they expand to 16 teams (with SMU/Houston and Tulsa/BYU), crown four division champions, and play two semi-final games in addition to the conference championship game. Increasing the number of conference games to 9 should make it doable, and I’d really love to see the three knockout games played in pro football stadiums. Specifically, San Diego, Denver, and Houston. That would bring in a crazy amount of money while improving the fan base in key “battleground” areas.

A western division should be anchored in California and Texas while making good geographic sense otherwise. Those are two of the three best recruiting states. It should be large enough to crown four division champions. That makes for a higher percentage of compelling regular-season games that deserve to be televised nationally, especially by the end of the season. And it should definitely create more big-ticket games by adding semis to the championship games, and all of those big-ticket games should be played in front of sold-out crowds at pro stadiums. The really large WAC idea was good in principle- with a couple of tweaks to the region and to the sharing of finances, this conference can start to legitimately compete with its neighbors, the Pac-12 and Big 12, while outshining every other football conference except the SEC.