A lot of people were assuming that the reason Hawai'i was being added to the Mountain West was to off set a potential loss of TCU to the Big East, but that may not be the case. San Diego State Stephen Weber said today that Hawai'i is not the only team the league is interested in:
"Hawaii is not the only school that we're interested in and have had informal conversations with," Weber said. "It's the first one that's gone far enough that we're willing to literally authorize the commissioner to begin to talk seriously."
Weber declined to say which other schools may be considered. Speculation has swirled around Houston of Conference USA.
"There is certainly some interest in getting to 12 if we could and contemplating perhaps a divisional setup where you'd have two six-team divisions," Weber said. "But we're a long way form that. There's going to be a meeting in January. It's been scheduled for a long time, and we'll probably be making some advances in nailing this stuff down."
The article aslo talks about reworking the television deal since Hawai'i is the 72nd market with 433,500 households which is just below Fresno State. The addition of a 12th team to have a title game could be to help offset the travel to cost by going to Hawai'i with the revenue that it would bring, and that would be in addition to the extra home games could get every other year.
The addition of a 12th team seemed like a no-brainer to myself since 11 teams is awkward and the league could only have eight conference games since it is mathematically impossible to play nine conference teams, and Air Force would like having eight conference games.
The usual suspects of Utah State, SMU, UTEP and Houston will be brought up as the 12th team, so I guess stay tuned until January when that seems to be when another announcement could be made.
(Hat tip: Smoove V)