THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Commish on the state of the Big Sky

Before all hell broke loose in college sports, Big Sky Conference commissioner Tom Wistrcill stood in the hallway of a casino in Airway Heights, Wash., in mid-July and provided a “state of the conference” of sorts to a handful of reporters.

He spoke of the excitement of ESPN GameDay coming to a Big Sky school — in this case, to Bozeman, Mont., in November for the Cat-Griz football game.

He talked about the landscape of college football.

“There’s a lot of movement at the Power Five level, and some of that might trickle down into the (Group of) Five,” Wistrcill said. “If it affects the FCS, we’ll wait and see. I feel comfortable about where we’re at as a league. I like our league — our 10 full-time members and two affiliates in football.”

Then he added …

“But I can’t predict what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Well, we know by now what happened “tomorrow.”

The Pac-12 got poached by the Big Ten, the Big 12, and even the ACC, and is now the Pac-2.

Maybe Washington State and Oregon State have a plan for survival. The Mountain West would love to take them in, but the appearance of the Cougs and Beavs “dropping down” to the Mountain West looks bad for them. If that turns out to be the result, perhaps a “merger” with said teams in a rebuilt Pac-Whatever would at least look better.

But for now, WSU and OSU are in their crates at the shelter, waiting to be adopted.

As for the Big Sky, we’ll see. Talk often pops up of the top Sky teams, like Montana and Montana State, perhaps moving from FCS up to a lower level of FBS.

Ask Idaho how that turned out.

HERE’S WISTRCILL on some other topics, back in mid-July at the Big Sky Football Kickoff:

ON THE IMPACT OF THE TRANSFER PORTAL AND NAME, IMAGE AND LIKENESS ON THE BIG SKY:

“The transfer portal has affected us in good ways and bad,” he said. “In some ways, in some of our sports, our best student-athletes who have eligibility left, they’re just going to leave. NIL and transfer portal all happening at the same time, just has made it different. So they can not only go and play at a higher level, but now they can get more money too. That was never the case before. But … we’ve also benefited. We’ve also had a number of really good transfers come into our programs from FBS and other programs. So we can’t sit here and say, ‘Oh it’s really been damaging to college athletics,’ because we’re benefiting from it. Our programs have really worked hard to get those types of players. And you see many of them on our all-conference (teams). It’s just very different. Building a program is a challenge now, and they (schools) need to focus on creating a foundation with those student-athletes, knowing no matter how good a relationship you have with them, they’re going to leave anyway. It’s just a new reality. Some would say it’s better; a lot of people would say it’s worse, but it’s not changing, so we need to embrace it.”

FOR THE BIG SKY TO DO BETTER IN THE NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT:

(Montana is the last Big Sky team to win an NCAA game. The Griz, as a 12 seed, beat fifth seed Nevada in 2006. Last year Montana State, a 14 seed, lost by 12 to third seed Kansas State.)

“Our bottom half of our league in men’s basketball, they need to get better,” Wistrcill said. “We can’t get our champion a high-enough seed in the NCAA tournament because of the games they are playing against the poorer teams in our league. If that bottom half wins, when our champion goes to the NCAA tournament, instead of being a 15 seed, maybe they’re a 13 seed … or a 12. Because the NCAA tournament is all about matchups. And your chances of getting a decent matchup as a 15 seed — not very good. Then, it’s a matter of what happens in those 40 minutes. Saint Peters, they got hot, FDU went on a run. We have teams that can do that, we just need the right matchup, and we need to get a better seed. At some point, it’s coming. That’s why we do a thing like the Summit League Challenge, so we can get more Division I home games, which we’re going to win most of those, because our venues are not easy to play in. The more home games we get, the better our bottom half gets, the better chance we have to win a game.”

ON THE BIG SKY’S PUSH TO HAVE THE TOP 16 TEAMS SEEDED IN THE 24-TEAM FCS FOOTBALL PLAYOFFS, RATHER THAN THE TOP EIGHT:

“All our teams would have been in the top 16 (last year), so what that tells me is, everybody is going to get at least one home game, and then you play in a tournament from there,” Wistrcill said. “So instead of top eight, and then you’re looking at geography and money, it’s a true tournament. Because we believe that the ninth-best team, and the 10th-best team, as it goes down, they should have advantages that the 16th team doesn’t. Right now, they don’t. … Yes, that helps us, absolutely helps us (to seed the top 16), because we’re going to have five, six teams in the playoffs every year, and quite frankly, our sixth-place team is better than the champion of many of the other leagues.”

AND THEN FOR THE BIG SKY TO ADVANCE TO THE FCS TITLE GAME, AND WIN IT:

(Eastern Washington, in 2010, is the last Sky team to win the championship.)

“Our challenge is real simple,” Wistrcill said. “We know who we are — we’re going to have those five, six teams in the mix. Quite frankly, what we need is teams in the Missouri Valley Conference, and the mid-pack of that, to beat North Dakota State and South Dakota State. Because if those two teams, their only loss is to each other, and the other one’s undefeated, it’s a challenge, they could be the 1 and 2 seeds in the FCS (the top three seeds last year were South Dakota State, Sacramento State of the Big Sky, and North Dakota State),. Because chances are, our champion is not going to be able to run the table; it’s too hard in our league to win every game, so that’s how we end up with the 3, 4, 6, 8 seed … because of the depth of our league.

“It’s been proven; when Montana State played at home, they went to the national championship game. When they went on the road, they lost and they didn’t, right? So it’s proven, if you get that home semifinal game (like the Bobcats did last year, when they won to advance to play South Dakota State in the title game), you have a good chance to go to Frisco. We have to find a way to be that team. So we’ll worry about what we can control, and schedule great opponents and win games and send teams in. We need some help around the country to get that home game in the semifinals. To me, it’s a math thing, the more teams we get in, the better our teams are, the better chance we have to be in Frisco.”

ON BIG SKY TEAMS AVOIDING FOOTBALL GAMES AGAINST NON-DIVISION I TEAMS

(Originally, Idaho had a game scheduled with Division II Western Oregon for this season, but was able to replace it with a game at Lamar, an FCS school.)

“In an ideal world, yes,” Wistrcill said. “Our biggest challenge is, most teams east of the Mississippi don’t have to hop on a plane for a nonconference game, or don’t want to. And then it’s just a matter of us enticing them with money to hop on a plane and fly here. We have plenty of teams that will fly there; our problem is, we can’t get teams to come to us. So when teams get caught and have to schedule non-Division I, I get it, but it also puts your football team in a tough situation. Chances are, you might be playing two money games then (like Idaho is this year, at Nevada this week and at Cal next week), and if you need to win seven Division I games to go to the playoffs, that means you probably have to go 7-1 in the league to make the playoffs. And there’s only a handful of teams in the league every year that have a chance to do that.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter @CdAPressSports.