Debunking a Myth - MWC is Weak at the Bottom

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Ever since the advent of the BCS, those conferences with automatic BCS bowl bids have considered themselves a step above those without.  By and large, the rest of the country bought it.  Whether they pointed to rankings, facilities, athletes, fanbase, wins or anything else, conferences like the Big 12 and SEC were just inherently better, even if their chosen criterion didn't actually support that claim.

As time has gone on, teams like TCU, Utah, Boise State and BYU have risen to national prominence, often competing with and beating blue-blooded programs such as Alabama, Michigan and Oklahoma.  The non-BCS leagues, especially the Mountain West, began to rightly say that their teams are just as good as any other conference's, and that they deserve equal treatment.  The BCS, intent on keeping the status quo, could no longer rely on the unquestioned idea that their schools were superior.  The fall back position has become that every team in their cadre is a quality program, while the lesser-prominent teams in non-BCS leagues were of such low quality that their presence made the entire conference unworthy of inclusion into their elite club.  This has been accepted by most people as a valid reason.  After all, who thinks a program like UNLV or Colorado State is even close to schools like Texas A&M or Cincinatti?  Unfortunately for BCS fanboys, the numbers tell a very different story.

With a non-conference lineup consisting mainly of patsies trucked in to take a beating and collect a paycheck, the win-loss records of some teams in the BCS have become inflated.  A mediocre team, going 4-4 in their own conference, can look like a pretty solid team when they play and beat 4 miserable teams, quite often from the FCS, and end the season 8-4.  So looking at straight win-loss records doesn't give an accurate picture of the quality of a team.  However, if we standardize the set of matchups we look at, say to out-of-conference teams in the 6 BCS conferences and Notre Dame, it provides a much clearer and direct comparison from which we can determine the validity of the idea that the weak teams in the Mountain West are weaker than the rest.

Within the past 10 years, the bottom 5 Mountain West teams have fared about how you would expect:

The BCS has routinely pointed to these numbers as evidence that these teams aren't ready for full-time inclusion in the BCS. They are all losing records, and just look at how horrid SDSU is, with 0 wins.  For comparison, here are a few BCS teams and their non-conference BCS records over the past 10 years:

Surprising, isn't it?  Some names on this list are completely expected.  Nobody is going to claim Duke is a football school or that Baylor is a powerhouse, but if I had said Arizona lost every non-conference BCS game it's played in the last decade, would you have believed me?  Cincinnati, one of the elites in the Big East, is a mere 3-11.  Texas A&M, who it's rumored the SEC wanted to steal away, and who the shrinking Big 12 paid big bucks to keep around, is a pathetic 3-13.  Even Alabama, last year's national champion and one of the winningest programs in all of college football, is barely above .500 at 8-7, and that is including 2 wins it has since had to vacate due to NCAA sanctions.

Unless your conference is full of exact clones with identical records (I'm looking at you, ACC), then there will be a bottom of your conference.  The Mountain West has a bottom to their conference, but it is ignorant to say that it is significantly worse than the bottom of any other conference out there.  With that myth debunked, I wonder what lie the BCS is going to prop up as a reason to keep the MWC out.