Utah Utes Change BCS Tune After Joining Pac-12

There are two ways to read Utah athletic director Chris Hill's sudden fondness for the bowl system, but modified by a plus-one game, after the Utes and the state of Utah itself have spent years agitating for a full college football playoff. Either he's won the battle over himself and now loves Big Brother, or the beginnings of a playoff system really are as inevitable as NCAA president Mark Emmert once predicted.

The SEC and ACC have proposed a plus-one before, and the Pac-12 didn't go out of its way to deny reports that it feels the same way. Utah's inclusion in the Pac-12 might have even helped steer the conference toward the light, though you'll presume commissioner Larry Scott already lives in an alternate future in which there has always been a 120-team college football space tournament and everybody's kind of tired of it, actually.

Even though there's a line or two in that Tribune story that make it sound like Hill has been indoctrinated into the bowl system -- "he now understands the tradition of bowl games, primarily of the Rose Bowl" -- let's choose to view him as a secret agent or something. It's what SLC Punk is about, I think.

ht Bryan Fischer