Getting lost in the dance of where BYU will end up is how many conference games will be played, because regardless of what BYU does the Mountain West is going to be at least a ten team league in 2012, or even 2011 if Nevada and Fresno State can strike that deal. Craig Thompson has mentioned that he prefers a round robin schedule and said as much when the league was looking to be a ten team league before Utah jumped at the chance to join the Pa-10. Air Force is dead set against playing nine conference games because they all ready play Army and Navy each year and one additional non-conference game hurts what Air Force wants to accomplish as a football program.
"From Air Force's perspective, we don't want any more than eight (conference) games, plus Army and Navy," Air Force Superintendent Lt. Gen. Mike Gouldsaid. "We need to retain the ability to have two discretionary games. Regardless of where the conference goes in size, I will continue to stand on that ground."
This makes a ton of sense, because Air Force does go out and schedule teams as they are this year by playing Oklahoma and they off set that by playing a smaller school such as this years buy-a-win is a Northwestern State. If the league goes to ten teams an eight game league schedule will work, but at eleven an eight team schedule could lead to multiples ties across the top and no title game to sort that out, and finally a twelve team league will work perfectly fine for an eight game conference schedule.
To make up the shortness of this here is some other Air Force news. They are building a $16 million indoor practice facility to be able to keep up with the rest of the Mountain West and college football.
Air Force is the only service academy and one of two teams in the Mountain West without an indoor practice center. That will change in the next year after Air Force gets the congressional notification it needs to start building a privately funded indoor training facility. The notification is basically a formality, and once it's in hand, groundbreaking can begin. The $16 million facility, which will have about a 94,000-square-foot interior, according to the academy, will take about six to eight months to complete.
This facility will help out Air Force quite a bit because in the current indoor track facility on campus the space is a tight fit and only one unit could practice at a time as they would have one unit in team meetings and the other unit working out. This indoor facility is an expensive necessity for the Falcons to keep up with the rest of college football.