Is Pac-12 a "forever" for U.?

When you hear Utah A.D. Chris Hill saying he has much work ahead in order to compete in the Pac-12, he’s not joking.

Mainly because he wants to be sure the Utes stay in the conference.

I’m not trying to raise alarms. I’ll let CBSsports.com’s Ray Ratto do that for me. As the Justice Department looks into the BCS’s monopoly, Ratto says the BCS may just take its football and go home.

Part of a hypothetical BCS restructuring could include super conferences, which theoretically might not include Utah. That’s because the low end BCS teams could get weeded out. Reading between the lines, if Utah isn’t competitive in the Pac-12, who knows? Maybe it will get uninvited some years down the road. That’s what happened when the Mountain West was formed from the WAC. The best WAC teams simply created their own conference, leaving out the also-rans.

“Frankly, the BCS was designed to keep out the riff-raff to begin with, and it did a hell of a job of it. Utah and Boise State and TCU were never part of the equation, and they aren’t going to be now,” wrote Ratto, last week. “When they did get themselves involved, though, and the BCS tried to buy them off with the usual trinkets and empty promises and failed, the problem morphed, and now it’s going to morph again.

“If the Justice Department is actually serious about this (and I still have my doubts, this being a prosecution of rich guys and all), the BCS will simply tell the NCAA that the Football Bowl Subdivision is now an even more closed shop. They bought off Utah with a trip to the Pac-12, TCU to the Big East, and Boise State got the thorny UnderArmour.

“And then they’ll close ranks, even if it means disbanding and reorganizing as something else. And yes, even if it means leaving the NCAA to do it.

“This won’t happen right away; let-’em-eat-cake revolutions never do. But there is sufficient will from the big schools to go now, and if need be, to keep changing conference memberships until schools currently within the organization get bumped out.

“It will be the mega-conference the BCS was always designed to be, and if, hypothetically, Iowa State or Washington State or Vanderbilt can no longer run with the stags, then they’ll be thanked for their service and given a ticket to Conference USA.”

Did you catch that? Washington State – a colleague of Utah’s in the Pac-12 – might end up in a smaller conference. If I’m reading this correctly, so could Utah if it doesn’t prove competitive enough to, as Ratto put it, “run with the stags.”

I’m not saying the Pac-12 would back out of any deal with Utah. But what I am saying is Utah better bet competitive if it wants to be included in any super conference alignments.

In this era, the term “being competitive” has a whole new urgency.

For Ratto’s full column, go to cbssports.com