There are four new bowls scheduled to come into creation this year. The Big East it appears, will be involved in two of them.

The new bowls have to be first approved by the NCAA bowl certification committee. More important, concerned parties are waiting for the NCAA board of directors to define bowl eligibility in 2006.

The board almost has to set the standard at 6-6 when it hands down the decision on April 27. The last time a 12-game schedule existed in 2002 and 2003, at least four teams became bowl eligible each year because of the six-win standard.

The NCAA barely found enough bowl-eligible teams last year (it needed 56) during the 11-game regular season. If teams were required to finish above .500 — in other words 7-5 in a 12-game schedule in 2006 — it’s almost certain there wouldn’t be 64 bowl-eligible teams.

A look at the new bowls waiting to be certified:

The new BCS national championship game which debuts Jan. 8, 2007 in the new Glendale, Ariz. stadium. Approval is a slam dunk.

The Birmingham Bowl, to be played at Legion Field, where UAB struggles to attract fans. This newbie would match Conference USA against either a Big East or MAC rep. Can’t wait.

The New Mexico Bowl in Albuquerque. Who cares who plays in it (Mountain West vs. WAC), this is what bowls are all about: a destination city where you can go from teeing off to snow skiing in 30 minutes.

International Bowl in Toronto. Nothing says college football like a match between Big East and MAC runners-up in Canada.

Not everyone is exactly enthused it seems. Dodd is right, though, that 6-6 will have to be where they set the bowl eligibility if they want to approve more bowls. There’s plenty of pressure from the BCS schools to do so anyways. They know they stand to benefit most with that kind of standard.

Not only has Mountain West moved its football and basketball games from ESPN to CSTV, they are creating a regional network.

The first regional sports network dedicated to a single conference has a name and a football schedule. It just doesn’t have agreements to be carried on cable in two of the Mountain West Conference’s biggest markets.

The MountainWest Sports Network will debut on Sept. 2 with four games, starting with Utah State at Wyoming.

Chris Bevilacqua, president of CSTV Regional Networks, said that while his company has a national agreement with Cox, it doesn’t yet have agreements with local providers in San Diego and Las Vegas.
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In August 2004, the nine-team Mountain West Conference, which spans three time zones, signed a seven-year, $82 million deal with CSTV that began last year.

It will carry 36 football games, 150 basketball games and more than 200 games in minor sports, as well as other programming.

“You’ve got to take it sequentially,” Thompson said. “We’re announcing it, announcing what’s going to be on it and showing some of the programming that will to be on it. Hopefully that will spur local interest and local cable operators to say, ‘This looks like a must-carry station.'”

Thompson said it will aim to be fan-friendly. The majority of the network’s football games will be played on Saturday afternoons, rather than in the evening, and only one will be on a Thursday night.

When CSTV came looking for a conference partner, “Our board just said, ‘ESPN, we’re very thankful and appreciative, but we don’t want to play on Tuesday night in football, and we don’t want to play at 10 o’clock on Monday nights,”‘ Thompson said. “We were tired of the times and the commitments that they were putting us into.”

MWSN will get on in those markets. It is just starting negotiations, and there is plenty of time. More important is getting on DirecTV and Dish satellite services.

Here in Ohio, we’ve just watched the Cleveland Indians go from FoxSports Ohio to their own network by the start of the season. Plenty of down to the wire negotiations, and the kinks still being worked out of the system.

This is the way things are going (NBA TV, NFL Network, YES …). Maximizing the money by doing your own network. It makes even more sense for conferences. It’s even easier to fill the dead space (not football and men’s basketball games) with all the other sports, the multitude of coaches and team propaganda there is.

It may seem like the Mountain West is limiting itself with its dealings with CSTV, but that is short term.

As they said, this was driven by ESPN marginalizing them in football to Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday nights. Killing their actual game attendance. As cable and satellite packages keep expanding, there’s no reason there won’t be tiers offering conference networks. Especially when some of the bigger conferences join in.

If I had to guess which BCS Conference will be first, I would say the SEC. They already have deals with CBS — who just happens to own CSTV. They have the fanbase that would support the network throughout the South.

Joe Lombardi was officially introduced as the new head coach at IUP. The second line was still the best part of the press release.

Indiana University of Pennsylvania Athletic Director Frank Condino has announced the appointment of Joe Lombardi as the university’s new head men’s basketball coach. The hiring was made following a national search.

Define “national.”

Lombardi’s wife, Janet, grew up in Indiana, Pa., and Lombardi spent eight seasons in the Blairsville area while at St. Francis and IUP.

The other finalists for the job were Jim Boone, the former coach at California University of Pa., Robert Morris and Eastern Michigan, and John Sanow, an assistant at Vermont and a former player at IUP in the early 1980s.

Lombardi said IUP was the only Division II job he would have accepted and he never considered going halfway around the country to become a head coach at a Division I school whose program is badly in need of repair.

“I haven’t had to travel long distances to pursue my career,” said Lombardi, who isn’t close to naming his assistants. “When you reach a certain age, you want to put down roots. IUP is where I want to be with my family.”

This is not to poke fun at Joe Lombardi. By all accounts, he is a fine coach, did a good job at Pitt and appears to have his family’s interests at heart in his job choice.

This is to poke some fun at IUP and the school’s administration.

The Indians play an NCAA Division II schedule, but school president Tony Atwater confirmed the program is studying the benefits of moving up to Division I. The football program also is studying a move to Division I-AA.

“Division I is something I’ve decided to not take off the table,” Atwater said. “If you don’t have dreams, you can’t accomplish great things.”

Atwater said the basketball program won’t move next season but could make the transition in a couple of years.

“It’s still on the table at this point,” he said. “We are exploring interest.”

The chance for IUP to move up from exhibition to patsy game against Pitt. Groovy.