Extra Points publisher Matt Brown suggests taking a look at a promotion/relegation system outside of football and media rights money, noting that the latter makes such a system in football all but intractable. Instead, Brown examines how Big West, Mountain West and West Coast Conference baseball programs might implement such a system. He notes the average RPI for a Big West program over the last three baseball seasons is roughly 136. For the Mountain West, it’s 140, and for the WCC, it’s 152. If the bottom two Big West schools (ex: Cal State Bakersfield and UC Riverside) moved to the WCC, and the top two WCC programs moved to the Big West, the “new Big West average RPI would be 103. The new WCC would be 189. The average Big West RPI if the league partnered with the MWC instead of the WCC (ex: adding San Jose State and Air Force) would be 108. A shift in 20+ points in average RPI may very well be enough to move from being a one-bid league to a two-bid league, or for the league champion to earn a three-seed (or better) instead of a four-seed in regional play. Softball tells a similar story.” The biggest hurdle to instituting such a system, according to Brown, is ego, as one senior administrator says no program wants to be viewed as being in the “Number 2” league. Difficulty scaling is another issue. Still, Brown asks, it’s “worth at least taking a meeting over, right?”