Back in August of this past year news broke about how the Mountain West and Conference USA were attempting to stage a title game between the two league champions with the winner getting a BCS berth. Talks have heated up again as C-USA Commissioner Britton Banowsky spoke to the Orlando Sentinel in an exclusive interview:
"We have talked about broad consolidation of some of our assets involved in our league and his league," Banowsky said of his conversations with Thompson. "It's a fairly aggressive and big idea. It is something that we are considering that might add value. We as a conference will continue to explore all our options."
This is a bold idea as stated and the MAC, Sun Belt and the WAC (or what is left of it) would not stand for it because it would create an even bigger divide between them and the BCS leagues. Plus, the BCS would have to open up another automatic bid to this winner in addition to the current rule that states a non-BCS champion ranked 12 or higher gets an auto-bid. I am not sure the BCS leagues would want to give up more money on occasion when two non-BCS schools get a bid.
Would this then put an end to the conference title games, possibly not. This game could take place the week after the conference title games and make this game between the Mountain West champ and C-USA champ the only game on (outside of Army and Navy since they play that weekend now). I can not see leagues going back from a title game since it does bring in extra revenue to that league.
The type of exposure this game would bring in would be huge to those leagues and teams and it would help with strength of schedule if either of the two are close to playing for the title. These two leagues are the strongest non-BCS leagues and the league winners of the two leagues right now are usually ranked in the top 25. However, the Mountain West has had the only BCS teams out of the two leagues and they may be reluctant to sending a 12-0 team to play a 9-3 East Carolina team and losing that bid, but that could go both ways.
I personally do not see this happening since the other non-BCS leagues would make a fuss over this. A compromise would have to be made where the highest rated conference champion from the non-BCS teams face off for the automatic bid. That is the only way to get all of the non-BCS leagues to agree; then to get the BCS teams to agree to this, the current automatic criteria for an automatic berth for a non-BCS team will have to be removed to make way for this new idea.