Despite suffering their first conference loss at Hawai’i on November 8, the Aztecs still controlled their own destiny. Win their final three games, and they would host the Mountain West Conference Championship Game. They won the first two, but dropped the final contest at New Mexico in double overtime on Black Friday. 

Then they had to wait nearly 40 hours until the Mountain West announced Sunday morning that Boise State would host UNLV in the championship game on December 5. The Aztecs’ quest to win their 22nd conference championship will wait another year. 

They will find out when and where they will play their bowl game when they are officially announced on December 7. Some potential conference tie-in bowls they could be headed to are the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl, Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, or the Guaranteed Rate Bowl.  

The Aztecs finished third in a four-way tie-breaker that was broken by a composite average of four nationally recognized metrics rankings: ESPN SOR, KPI, Connelly SP,+ and SportSource. The final averages and metrics were as follows:

UNLV (45.50) led all four teams that finished with 6-2 conference records, followed by Boise State (47.75), San Diego State (51.0,0), and New Mexico (54.75).

For the third consecutive season, the Rebels and Broncos will meet in the final game. The Broncos are looking to three-peat on their way out of the conference. Despite finishing second in the composite average, Boise State will host the game because of their head-to-head matchup win earlier in the season. 

Despite all the misconceptions flooding social media this weekend about what the tiebreaker rules are or are not, what they should be, and whether the conference “rigged” the final decision, the process laid out well in advance of the start of the season played out in accordance to the rules. 

Before the 2023 season, the Mountain West comprised two divisions, with the winners of each division facing off in the final game. The conference eliminated divisions, instead opting to maximize the chance that the two best teams in the conference would play for the championship, instead of the two division winners. The intention was to maximize the opportunity to have their conference champion be in the mix for the College Football Playoff as the highest-ranked Group of Five champion. 

Within the current rules, head-to-head results are and always will be the first tiebreaker. In this situation, since all four teams did not meet in the regular season (UNLV and SDSU were not scheduled to play each other), the unbalanced record among the four teams led to the next step in the tiebreaker process. 

Despite New Mexico and Boise State finishing 2-1 against the other three teams, SDSU was not given a chance to also reach 2-1 (they were 1-1 against UNM and Boise State) by not playing UNLV. It would have been unfair to SDSU to base the decision on this unbalanced record and advance the Lobos and Broncos to the championship game. UNLV was 0-2 against the two teams and therefore benefited the most from the rule.

None of the teams were ranked in the latest College Football Playoff rankings, so the tiebreaker was in line to be broken by the composite rankings average. Since the average is calculated based on the relative ranking of the teams, final rankings were not available until all the games were completed on Saturday night. 

Three of the metrics are publicly available and updated online. Two of them updated after Friday’s results, giving the schools a better idea where they stood in those metrics. Connelly’s SP+ metric was not updated until after Saturday’s games. 

SportSource, the fourth metric, is a proprietary subscription-based service that is not publicly available and, therefore, left a major unknown to fans heading into the final weekend.  

Is the process fair and reasonable?

Fairness can be a subjective viewpoint depending on which team or school one favors. Given the unbalanced conference schedule, though, the process played out as it should and was determined by rankings completely outside the control of the Mountain West. 

Claims about the Mountain West sabotaging the final decision to harm a team (SDSU) that is bolting the conference to the Pac-12 does not pass muster when you take into account Boise State made it and is also leaving the conference. Not to mention, the Broncos are in litigation against the conference over exit fees. SDSU is not. 

If the conference was going to step in and affect matters, wouldn’t it be more likely that the Broncos felt their wrath? 

Other thoughts floated online were that non-conference records should be factored into the tiebreakers as a team’s total body of work before it heads to the computers. In this scenario, UNLV’s 4-0 record would lead the way, while SDSU and UNM tied at 3-1. Boise State finished 2-2. 

But the variability of non-conference scheduling would leave too much room for debate and discussion. Do you harm Boise State for scheduling a game on the road against Notre Dame, the 9th-ranked team in the country? Do FCS games count, or should they be excluded? 

The counter point is that the computer metrics not only account for non-conference records, but factor in strength of schedule and opponent records. They are probably a more comprehensive measure of a team’s body of work than the overall record. 

So what about the metrics themselves? 

All four are nationally recognized metrics. The AAC uses the same four metrics as a tiebreaker scenario.

Most of the controversy lies with SportSource and its proprietary nature. A metric being proprietary and not publicly available does not make it any less valid or defensible. What the fans wish to know is likely something the schools know as the season progresses. 

All four Power conferences rely on the SportSource metric as a step in their tiebreaker scenarios as well. It is not a random metric that the Mountain West arbitrarily chose.  

Is there a better alternative?

Looking at tiebreaker scenarios across other conferences, an additional step before heading to the computer rankings is calculating winning percentage among common opponents. This would include records against the teams in the conference that every team in the tiebreaker played.

Would this have changed the 2025 Mountain West Championship Game matchup?

All four teams played Nevada and Colorado State in 2025, and all four went 2-0 against them. 

So no. It would have proceeded to the composite rankings anyway. 

There are certainly other methods for use to break tiebreakers as well. Great arguments can be made why those would be better than using computer rankings. Regardless of what is implemented and used, the team(s) left out will be left feeling scorned. 

Andre Haghverdian

Avid sports fan and historian of basketball, baseball, football and soccer. UC San Diego and San Diego State alumni living in America’s Finest City. Diverse team following across multiple sports leagues, but Aztecs come first in college athletics.