Ferd Lewis: Mountain West Conference faces challenge like no other conference

IT took 45 days for the Mountain West Conference to resuscitate its 2020 football season and that might turn out to be the easiest part of this whole enterprise.

Now, its 12 members, including the University of Hawaii, who pulled the plug on the season Aug. 10, will attempt to negotiate the COVID-19 gauntlet to actually play this laboriously launched season.

The MWC’s social media announcements Thursday were short on details and long on celebratory gestures (from a safe, CDC-recommended distance, of course).

Its Board of Directors announced an eight-game season to begin 29 days hence and conclude with a conference championship game Dec. 19. The league is expected to fill in more of the particulars, hopefully including scheduling, whether there will be any fans in the stands, testing protocols for its players, coaches and staff, dealing with quarantines and other major points in this morning’s virtual press conference.

And if the devil is said to be in the details in normal times, you can begin to imagine the challenge that comes with attempting to cram all those games into this tight of a window by giving it the new college try amid a pandemic.

Let’s remember that, to date, nearly 20 percent of the scheduled games have either been canceled or postponed before this week due to the impact of the virus. That’s prior to teams from the Big Ten, Pac-12 and Mountain West conferences even taking the field.

And, now, here comes the MWC with teams spread across eight states, four time zones and a couple of quarantines ready to join the scrum.

Three hours after the Pac-12 announced its teams would commence a seven-game schedule on Nov.6, the MWC presidents said, “Hey, don’t forget about us.”

Of course the stampede was started last week by the Big Ten reversing its earlier prohibition on fall football.

“I think once the Big Ten elected to play, we didn’t want to be the last league out there not playing,” Washington State president Kirk Schulz said of the Pac-12 in a moment of candor on a Pullman, Wash., radio station Thursday.

Once the MWC followed in step that left only the Mid-American Conference lagging among the 10 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences. And, MAC presidents are scheduled to meet again today.

In the MW six of the teams, including the Rainbow Warriors, are in hurry-up mode having had little or no spring ball. Many have been without much of a summer or early fall practice to speak of.

By returning ahead of and in the absence of the other fall sports on some campuses (volleyball, soccer, cross country, anyone?), the MW will keep its brand out there. It will also begin cashing some of those checks from the first year of the new six-season, $270-million TV rights deal with the CBS Sports and Fox networks. And, maybe, it might even place its champion in the lucrative New Year’s Six bowl mix.

It was left to defending champion Boise State’s social media announcement to perhaps best sum up the bottom line on the return of football in a post that exulted, “Back in business!”

But, to paraphrase Dr. Anthony Fauci, it will be the virus that ultimately determines how good or how costly that business turns out to be.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.