THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Sunday, February 14, 2016

The University of Idaho’s future in the Sun Belt Conference will be determined by a collection of leaders of schools mostly in the southeastern portion of the United States.

The Vandals will make the case that their school in the Northwest, thousands of miles away from most of the rest of the league, remain in the Sun Belt Conference in football on Monday, when school president Chuck Staben makes a video presentation to administrators of each conference school.

Then, the Vandals will wait.

The Sun Belt is scheduled to vote March 10 in New Orleans on whether to boot the Vandals from the conference, effective after the 2017 football season, or vote to keep them as a football-only member.

Idaho needs nine votes from the 11 schools to remain in the conference.

“We look forward to presenting,” Idaho athletic director Rob Spear said. “We’ve shown a lot of improvement, we look forward to showcasing that improvement when we present, and then we’ll await the outcome.”

IT’S ALL about money — and geography. But mostly money. Idaho (and fellow Sun Belt member New Mexico State, whose fate is also up in the air next month) are far, far away from the other nine football-playing schools in the Sun Belt. So traveling, say, to Idaho, is a lot more expensive than traveling to another school in the Southeast — though the Vandals help pay for teams traveling to Moscow. Idaho is at least 1,600 miles from any other Sun Belt team not nicknamed the Aggies.

The plan all along was for the Sun Belt to get to 12 members for football, so it could form two six-team divisions and have the option of holding a (money-making) conference title game. Idaho and New Mexico joining in 2014 brought the league to 11 — with Coastal Carolina scheduled to join the Sun Belt in 2018.

But with the recent ruling that the Big 12 can play a conference title game with just 10 members, that could affect other conferences with less than 12 teams.

“If you don’t have to have 12, does it make sense to divide the pot of money by 12 or by 10?” Spear said. “But in our case, we look forward to the opportunity (to present our case), because we are not the school that’s dragging the Sun Belt down.”

How so? Perhaps in 2014, when Idaho won just one game, but not this past fall, when the Vandals won four games and blew two others, costing them a chance to become bowl-eligible.

More money talk — Spear said there’s roughly $90 million from the College Football Playoff TV deal, $50 million of which is allocated equally among the Group of Five conferences (of which the Sun Belt is one) — $10 million per conferences.

An additional $34 million is distributed based on a formula — the top-ranked conference of the Group of Five gets roughly $9.8 million, the fifth-ranked conference gets around $3.7 million. And, using a consensus of computer rankings of teams and conferences from six sources, the Sun Belt is rated fifth, out of five.

And the highest-rated Group of Five schools that plays in one of the New Year’s Six bowl games gets $6 million — allocated between the school and its conference.

“In theory, they (the Sun Belt) would like to find a way to move up,” Spear said.

Spear noted that, in this year’s rankings of schools and their conferences, Idaho was ranked ahead of four other Sun Belt schools.

“And the team ranked ahead of us, we beat on the road,” Spear said. “So when you look at schools impacting you (negatively), it’s not Idaho anymore.

“If you’re going to shrink your conference, and you’re going to do it strategically, and you want to keep the best schools in, the data shows that Idaho deserves to be in the Sun Belt,” Spear added.

For years, Spear has spoken of the hope that a “second tier” of FBS schools is formed, a tier below the Power Five conferences, and perhaps the better Big Sky Conference teams can move up from FCS, and Idaho can join them and be back in a western league.

Either way, the Big Sky is a likely landing spot for Idaho in football if the Vandals are booted from the Sun Belt. Idaho is now back in the Big Sky in nearly every other sport.

“I do think at some point in time there will be restructuring and that happens,” Spear said. “Because I do not see, with the change in the number of teams needed to hold a conference championship, no conferences are going to add teams. You’re not going to add schools and have one more mouth to feed. So I don’t see a lot of realignment where conferences are adding teams. And I think this split between the Group of Five and the Power Five is widening. Especially with the autonomy things that were passed. And I think it’s just a matter of time before there’s a formal shift, and there is a creation of a second tier — but that may be well after I’m done.”

The Vandals have a standing invitation to return to the Big Sky, where they enjoyed their football heyday in the 1980s and early ‘90s. Many longtime Vandal fans yearn for the return of those days, with games against regional rivals like Montana and Montana State, as well as Eastern Washington.

His concern with the current Big Sky?

“The Big Sky was very strategic when they added a lot of schools, because they added a lot of the schools that the WAC was considering, and they essentially put the WAC out of the football business,” Spear said. “The downside of that strategy is, the Big Sky has gotten themselves too big — 13 football schools, and long term, is that too many?”

Three of those 13 schools were selected for the 24-team FCS playoffs last fall.

SPEAR TOUCHED on a few other topics during a recent visit to Coeur d’Alene, as part of a Vandal football signing day function:

• On whether season three was a make-or-break season for Vandal football coach Paul Petrino, who won just one game in each of his first two seasons in Moscow:

“I don’t know if I ever viewed it that way, because I could see progress all the way along,” Spear said. “He has just faced adversity since he’s been at Idaho — when he first came, we weren’t in a conference. Then we get into a conference and we get hit with the APR sanctions — none of which were his fault. And he has since bailed us out, and we’ve got ourselves in a good position now. Then last year we had all those distractions in the fall (the anonymous email critical of the program, the Dezmon Epps suspension, reinstatement and eventual dismissal, among other things) that were, in my opinion, nonsense. So he has battled a lot of adversity and, our program has continued to get better. And that is extremely encouraging, and he is just one heck of a football coach, and one heck of a person. It’s just so unfortunate that, out of 48 quarters of football, we were two quarters away from going to a bowl game.”

• On the Big Sky men’s and women’s basketball tournaments moving to Reno, a neutral site, for the next two years. In the past, the league champion has hosted the tourneys, often on short notice:

“Love it,” Spear said. “It was one of the things we advocated for when we got into the Big Sky, because we came out of a league in the WAC that had the tournament in Vegas. There’s a couple things that make it the right thing — one is, having a neutral site, getting off the host school’s home court, it’s tough to win a game on somebody else’s court. The other thing, I think you take care of the student-athlete better. There were so many examples of student-athletes not knowing whether they’re going to make the tournament, or where the tournament would be, and that would preclude their parents coming and watching them play. So now that all teams are in, it’s planned in advance, it gives everybody an opportunity to get there. And it’s a lot better situation to plan for travel-wise. Thankfully, last year Montana ended up being the host school (for the men’s tournament), and we were able to bus over (to Missoula). But if you’re a school, and you have to get airfare at the last minute, it becomes very expensive.”

Spear said not having a “home” crowd could be a “negative,” but he’s hopeful Reno becomes an annual destination place for Big Sky fans, just like Las Vegas has become for West Coast Conference (mostly Gonzaga) fans. He said with the West Coast, the WAC, the Mountain West and the Pac-12 already holding conference tourneys in Vegas, there was no room left for the Big Sky.

* On playing just one money game per year — in some recent years, the Vandals have played two:

“It’s one of the things we told the Sun Belt we would do,” Spear said. “One of the things they want, long term, they want you to play against the Mountain West and the MAC, maybe Conference USA, and maybe try to elevate the league by trying to win those nonconference games. So we’re not going to play as many money games, (and instead play) two or three nonconference games each year against those Group of Five leagues. We’re going to have to find a way to make it work financially.”

One positive — “The money from those guarantee games continues to go up,” he said. “We’re getting $1.45 million to play at Penn State in 2019. Four or five years ago, you had to play two of those to make that much money.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.