Mountains are meant to cast shadows over a landscape, but this season, the Mountain West is standing in the shadows, all while the American Athletic Conference becomes the best Group of Five league by a country mile.
It’s an unwelcome turn of events in the Rocky Mountains and areas beyond. The league which once had every reason to puff out its chest in early January is now a shell of its former self.
It’s true that Boise State gave the league more glory in the 2014-2015 bowl season, decking Arizona in the Fiesta Bowl to uphold its reputation as an elite Fiesta Bowl program. Yet, Boise State defeated a nothingburger Fresno State side in the Mountain West Conference Championship Game, the product of yet another pronounced split in quality between two divisions in a conference. If the SEC East and Big Ten West suffered last year in comparison with their much stronger in-league divisions, the Mountain West’s West Division inhabited the same identity relative to the Mountain West’s Mountain Division.
Boise State won the Mountain in 2014, but Utah State, Colorado State, and Air Force all turned in high-level seasons as well. There was reason to hope that after the departures of Utah, TCU and BYU — which all detracted from what was a very credentialed (and fun) league — the Mountain West had found stable replacements, teams that could carry the banner for years to come.
This season, with November still ahead, it’s hard to say that anyone has made the Mountain West look just as good as last year. It goes without saying that the league isn’t close to being better than it was in 2014.
It’s true that Colorado State was set up for hardship this season. A coaching change and roster turnover were not going to treat the Rams very kindly. It’s also true that quarterback injuries have ravaged the Mountain West Mountain Division, with Air Force, Utah State, and Boise State all seeing number-one signal callers go down at early points in the campaign. Yet, even with all that, the abrupt reversals in this “year of the 180” have been a bit too much.
Even with backup quarterbacks involved, we shouldn’t be seeing the erratic play that’s spilling from our TV screens on Mountain West Friday nights. Boise State committed — wait, let’s interrupt that statement and simply cue up LeBron James here:
You will note that LeBron stopped at “not seven.”
Yes, Boise State’s turnover count was the same as LeBron’s initial Miami Heat world championship count: EIGHT. Even with a backup quarterback, that should never, ever happen against a team not called the 1985 Chicago Bears or the 1978 Pittsburgh Steelers.
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Let’s be fair, though: Maybe that 52-26 result marked the arrival of Utah State as the team ready to become the big cheese in the Mountain West. Maybe that game was the product of Matt Wells getting his defense to play a marvelous game against the defending Fiesta Bowl champions and one of the foremost Group of Five programs in the land. Maybe that game was more about what the winner did than what the loser did (and failed to do).
The next Friday night, Utah State’s game at West Division leader San Diego State was going to tell us plenty.
Final score: San Diego State 48, Utah State 14.
The Aggies committed four turnovers, passed for under 100 yards on only nine completions, and trailed by a 34-7 score at halftime.
What is going on here?
(The answer: The Pac-12, only worse.) Abrupt reversals in performance from week to week, as opposed to gradual improvements or declines, have marked a Mountain West in which no one is safe… and no team has particularly distinguished itself. The San Diego State team which is in command of the MWC West somehow messed around and lost to South Alabama at home. Los Aztecs also surrendered 37 points to Penn State a month ago, when the Nittany Lions’ offense — especially the offensive line — was in shambles.
Air Force got clobbered by Navy one year after beating the Midshipmen. The Falcons gave Michigan State a run in September, but over the following month-plus, teams such as Purdue and Rutgers played the Spartans even more closely.
There just isn’t anything the Mountain West can hang its hat on right now. The only hope is that the AAC — which has four legitimately good teams at this point (Memphis, Houston, Temple, and Navy) — will cannibalize itself in November, enabling an 11-2 Boise State to improbably steal the Group of Five New Year’s Six bowl bid. That’s an extreme longshot, one which would also require Toledo (in the MAC) to lose at least once.
Ultimately, the New Year’s Six bowl isn’t the biggest concern right now — it’s that far off the radar. What the Mountain West needs is a November in which multiple teams announce themselves as consistently dependable forces, teams that won’t emerge one week and disappear the next.
The Mountain West has seen the AAC move miles ahead in the Group of Five conference pecking order, but the point worth mentioning there is that the coaches who made the AAC so special this season could land bigger jobs in December. The path to renewed prominence could soon emerge for the Mountain West, but November has to produce far better results than what we’ve seen through eight weeks.
