I noticed after publishing my Split Championship post that the Mountain West Conference managed to get the perfect football season that they fell short of last year with perfect order top to bottom in the conference.
The only blemish being their 4-1 record in bowl games this year and the glitch that Colorado State appears to have played an easier non-conference schedule than UNLV, San Diego State, and New Mexico.
The BYU Football team motto for this year was “the quest for perfection.” It looks like the Mountain West Conference adopted the same goal. Like the Cougars, the conference fell short of its goal. There was exactly one conference game that did not follow the script this year. Here are the final conference standings for 2008:
The only game that did not follow the script for perfection this year was played on Saturday, November 22nd. Some people might expect that I would suggest that the BYU/Utah game was the one that didn’t go the right way – they would be wrong. The game that failed to follow the script was the UNLV/San Diego St. game. Had that game gone the other way the standings would be:
The perfection here is not just the order, but the fact that every team would have lost to every team ranked higher and beaten every team ranked lower. There would be no way to argue who was better based on overall standings or individual games.