Well the Corvallis Gazette idea would suck

Just a thought.  Why would these conferences totally disrupt their league schedule and OOC partnerships with other schools to accommodate OSU and WSU on a short term agreement?  I see little incentive for them to do that?    IF buyouts are involved they will have to spend some serious cash.  If agreement are short term will they demand payments to visit like an OOC game?   I would in their shoes.

Anyway the WCC is a collection of small private schools.  WSU and OSU don't fit their profile.

Other schools have little incentive to buy out games, even if we pay them to do it. Most schools have their OOC games already set, and set on the front end of a 13 week season, and for OSU to get a full slate of games we’d have to expect teams to basically give up mid-season and late-season bye weeks. It’s not so easy as saying it’d be easy to find 8 schools willing to let us buy out a game, we have to do it on specific weekends over the course of the entire season. Add to that, we’d probably be messing with league schedules at the same time, that’s asking a lot. The longer it takes to get started on this scheduling, the more difficult this is going to be. I’m just talking football, we’d be looking at a full docket of sports. It would not be as easy as some people think.

If we've learned anything these past few months the best strategy is to tell others what they want to hear, and then stab them in the back under the name of "doing what's best for (insert school)."

The MWC currently plays 8/4 with 12 teams. A merger the 2st year or two wouldn't have to change that.

Merged it's 14 teams, the MWC teams could keep their 4 NC and still schedule 8 league games.

OSU/WSU could easily pick up a 4th NC game/home revenue. Especially if any of the MWC teams have an open game as it could be scheduled as NC that season. No buyouts needed.

Consider that we will have two games to "market" to ANY non-conference opponents if we have to schedule as a two team conference.

Say Minnesota is playing Miss. St.. We can offer them an incentive to kill that game and play OSU and WSU instead. I think that we would have the funds available to put together a rather nice schedule that could entice viewers from around the country. We would need to get the buy in of some network other than our own to pull that off though.

First, Oregon State and Washington State do not want to reverse merger with the Mountain West Conf.  Nor do we want to just join the MWC.  Doing either of those would basically turn OSU and WSU into G5 schools, losing our P5 status.

However, poaching the MWC for the 6 best schools or the relegation and promotion concept has potential.  The benefit of relegation and promotion is that it helps ensure OSU and WSU play the best MWC every year and skip the many of the MWC's weaker programs.  

Keep in mind that relegation and promotion only applies to football.  The other sports would be completely decoupled from how football is relegated and promoted.

By the way, I share the view of a few others on this forum that is we're able to pull some of the MWC's best programs away from the rest of the conference (poach 6 schools), then we should see an improvement in the quality of those programs over time.  They'll get better because of having the PAC-X conference affiliation and a better TV contract (maybe $10M to $15M).  After all, remember how Utah got better when they joined the PAC-12.

Finally, the Gazette-Time author wrote this:

>> The other advantage is in recruiting. California is by far the most important recruiting area for Oregon State. A partnership with the Mountain West would bring new rivalries against three California schools — San Jose State, Fresno State and San Diego State.


I agree with the author of the article on this.  If we can get those 3 California schools on our football schedule every year, then that would help with recruiting California.