March Madness has come early for the Mountain West Conference -- as in 14 months early.
The MWC, which debuts this fall, has averted a potential obstacle by receiving an automatic bid to the 2000 NCAA men's basketball tournament. Ordinarily, a newly formed conference must wait five years to earn an guaranteed spot for its regular-season or league-tournament champion. However, partly because the league has had seven of its eight members together for nearly two decades, the NCAA waived that requirement.BYU, Utah, Air Force, Colorado State, Wyoming, New Mexico and San Diego State have been part of the WAC since 1980. The eighth school, UNLV, joined that group in 1996.
The announcement helps validate the MWC, which has taken another big step toward its stated goal of becoming a nationally prominent league.
"This is huge," said commissioner Craig Thompson, who opened the conference headquarters in Colorado Springs this week. "The interpretation is for men's basketball only, but it's the most restrictive field."
Thompson anticipates that league champs in other sports, such as golf, volleyball and women's basketball, will also be welcomed by the respective NCAA championship fields.
Then there's the ongoing plight of the Western Athletic Conference, from which the eight MWC schools announced a split last year. The WAC may have some trouble with the continuity requirement. While Texas-El Paso, Fresno State and Hawaii have been in the WAC for years, Texas Christian, Southern Methodist, Rice, San Jose State and Tulsa didn't join the conference until 1996.
WAC commissioner Karl Benson says the league has filed a waiver request on that matter. "If the Mountain West Conference has been provided special consideration by the NCAA, I certainly hope the WAC is afforded the same treatment," Benson said. "The whole issue of automatic bids in exaggerated. The WAC is a strong enough basketball conference to gain bids without the automatic spot coming into play."
The NCAA men's tournament currently offers 30 automatic bids, a number that is supposed to jump to 32 next season.
As for football, Thompson, who is attending the NCAA Convention in San Antonio this weekend, is busily engaged in negotiating bowl partnerships. He is targeting at least three automatic tie-ins with various bowl games next season. Among the options is the San Diego-based Holiday Bowl, which severed its longstanding relationship with the WAC last summer.
The Las Vegas Bowl, played at the home of UNLV, is a strong possibility, and several new opportunities could open up as postseason games in San Francisco, St. Louis, Houston and Mobile, Ala., have been proposed.
Thompson hopes the Bowl Championship Series will at least agree upon a similar arrangement with the MWC it had last year with the WAC -- that any team with a national ranking of No. 6 or higher would be granted an automatic bid to a BSC game.
From a financial standpoint, it appears the MWC has bolstered its position dramatically. The presidents have authorized a seven-year, $48 million package for football and basketball with ESPN and are awaiting finalization from the all-sports cable network.
If the deal goes through, it would mean revenue of nearly $7 million to be shared among eight schools. By contrast, the package in place for the WAC, which expires at the end of the basketball season, produced just $3.5 million to be shared among 16 schools.