Despite concerns, WAC and Mountain West agree to new BCS deal

The presidents of nine WAC schools voted unanimously Wednesday morning to accept the current terms of the Bowl Championship Series and agreed to participate in the system through 2014 despite concerns about access to the five prestigious bowl games and revenue distribution.

The conference will attach a letter “that will lay out the concerns we have and basically express our strong objection to the current BCS structure,” Boise State president Bob Kustra said.

The Mountain West Conference announced Wednesday afternoon that it, too, had agreed to the deal with the BCS and television partner ESPN despite concerns.

ESPN will pay $125 million annually to televise the BCS. The conference needed to agree to the deal by Thursday in order to remain partners in the agreement. The Mountain West and WAC were the lone holdouts among the 11 Division I-A football conferences as of Wednesday.

“That’s the way both conferences are looking at it: We have no choice,” Kustra said. “Everybody understood that there are so many financial ramifications to not signing it. We simply didn’t have any elbow room on this.”

Kustra said Tuesday that not signing the agreement “may be a risk worth taking.” In the end, however, he voted to accept the agreement.

“The repercussions were just too dramatic and too costly. Can you really take that chance?” Kustra said.

WAC commissioner Karl Benson sent the presidents a memo detailing the problems associated with not agreeing to the deal before the vote. Benson did not take an official position nor did he vote on the matter.

“The commissioner was basically telling us we didn’t have a big choice,” Kustra said. “We could all read between the lines.”

In a statement released Wednesday, the Mountain West Conference said: "The Mountain West believes it has no choice at this time but to sign the agreements. If a conference wishes to compete at the highest levels of college football, and the only postseason system in place for it is the BCS, no conference can afford to drop out and penalize its football programs and student-athletes."

The WAC and Mountain West are among five Division I-A conferences that do not receive an automatic berth in one of the five BCS bowl games. The five leagues split a 9-percent share of the value of the BCS, typically about $9.5 million in years past.

The payout will rise about 40 percent with the new agreement, Benson said.

In addition, if a team from one of those five conferences qualifies for a BCS bowl game, the leagues receive another 9 percent share.

Kustra said he believes the BCS system can be modified from the inside, as the WAC is now a partner in the agreement. He said he would like to see expanded representation for the five non-automatic qualifying conferences.

“You can tweak the system a bit at this stage. It will still be an imperfect system,” Kustra said. “We’ll take whatever we can get now in hopes we can do more down the road.”