SAN JOSE, Calif. >>  No need to start planning University of Hawaii football trips combined with Disney World vacations … not yet, anyway. Hopefully, and probably, never.

Even if Central Florida doesn’t leave for the Big East, regular Hawaii road games at Orlando, Fla., to play the Knights — or to other of the southeast based C-USA schools — aren’t part of the plan in the Mountain West’s new football-only alliance with C-USA. The blueprint is for two divisions; and there is no rule that says conference members have to play each other.

Thank goodness for that. The last thing a UH program that seems to be regressing to a shaky road team again needs in the near future is more action even farther from home. For every decisive road win like the fine effort at LaTech two weeks ago there are more head scratchers like the sloppy losses at UNLV and then Friday night here in the Silicon Valley featuring six Warriors turnovers and two more blocked kicks.

But if Hawaii wins the Mountain West championship some year, then it would go up against the C-USA champ. And if it wants to play someone from C-USA in the regular season, it could do so as a nonconference game. How about a preseason conference challenge?

If the Big East’s raid is successful and Boise State, Air Force, Houston, Central Florida, UCF and SMU all leave, the new alliance will still have enough teams to play football.

"If we lose a couple of schools, we’re still way above the magic number (to have a football-playing conference)," Hawaii athletic director Jim Donovan said.

He added that there is potential for significantly better TV revenue.

This is a pre-emptive move by the two most prominent mid-major conferences to protect their interests — not to spend more time and money on ridiculous road games.

There’s also the idea of an easier path to a BCS bowl game for the winner of the championship game, which would be played the first week of December. That only works if the champ is undefeated, and maybe not even then. The big conferences still have almost complete control of the system and the biggest bundles of cash. Why else would anyone even consider the Big East a soft landing spot?

In some ways it resembles when the WAC expanded to 16 schools back in the ’90s. That proved to be an idea ahead of its time by at least two decades. And we know how it worked out for Hawaii — not very well.

You can call it creative, you can call it contrived. I just hope people will stop describing it with words like "mega" and "super" in front of "conference." Uhhh, not quite — even if the Big East invitees don’t leave.

But what are you gonna do? In the increasingly hostile environment of conference realignment, you can’t really sit there idle — especially if you’re not one of the big fish.

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Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783.