MWC makes right call by not expanding now

Think of it this way: You don’t spend precious dollars to purchase a copy of “Porky’s II: The Next Day,” because once Pee Wee lost his virginity in the original, well, how do you top that cinematic brilliance? You don’t add “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” to your collection just to watch Kirk talking back to God. You don’t ever, ever waste time on a “Caddyshack” flick without Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield.

In other words, don’t ruin a good thing by overthinking the room and wanting more.

The Mountain West Conference has shown an intelligent level of pause for now in not expanding past the 10 schools that will compete for its football championship in 2012.

It has decided that the hiking trails at Logan Canyon and the annual children’s faire in the Bay Area aren’t good enough reasons to invite Utah State or San Jose State, given neither would deliver any substance when pursuing an automatic bid into the Bowl Championship Series.

And hasn’t that become the meaning of life for all?

I’m not even convinced the Aggies and Spartans were ever in play to bolt the Western Athletic Conference, which has become the collegiate version of Wachovia.

I guarantee if someone tweeted Bishop Gorman was about to join the Mountain West, others would run with the story. That, of course, would not be a good thing around here.

How would it look for the prep power to be signing more local football recruits than UNLV?

This isn’t to say Mountain West officials won’t wake up a day or week or month from now and convince themselves they can’t live without hosting games in the mud swamp that can be Spartan Stadium, but it would have nothing to do with the main reasons a league expands.

Conference championship games in football are nice when you are the Pac-12 and have a network such as Fox pay you a one-year rights fee of $25 million, $10 million of which will go solely to promoting and marketing the event.

They aren’t so great when you could probably expect a rights fee of $5 million to $7 million and staging one won’t ensure the winner an automatic BCS berth.

Leagues expand nowadays for a few reasons — does it help one’s BCS standing, and how much does it add value in terms of TV markets?

Utah State won’t draw many Salt Lake City viewers away from watching whatever channels Utah and Brigham Young will be on once departing the conference. The same goes for San Jose State — how many people in the Bay Area do you really think watch the mighty Spartans?

The Mountain West is probably another terrific football season away from pushing the BCS suits so far against their snooty and inequitable wall of embarrassment, they will have to relent by granting the league a two-year window of automatic inclusion.

The numbers will be close. Very close. The criteria for automatic bids — your highest-ranked team in the BCS, overall strength of the league, how many of your teams fall into an adjusted top 25 — should have the Mountain West banging on the vault’s door after the 2011 season.

This is how the Mountain West stated its case Tuesday: “The board feels strongly the membership configuration already established going forward creates outstanding prospects for future success.”

Or, simply: Utah State? San Jose State? We’d rather have Bishop Gorman, a much better football fit.

The Mountain West today should feel good about being by far the nation’s best nonautomatic qualifier and having none of the other hopefuls within arm’s reach in terms of recent football success, that its football middle will be strengthened in 2012 when UNR and Hawaii and Fresno State join Boise State in completing the 10-team league.

It should worry more about improving its TV package than expansion, more about getting the most out of its deal with Comcast and reminding someone at CBS College Sports that the league’s official name really isn’t the Armed Forces Network.

Utah State and San Jose State and really Houston or Southern Methodist from Conference USA don’t make it financially worthwhile to extend invitations. None would improve a TV package that already owns some noticeable holes.

Expansion isn’t finished in college athletics. Perhaps not by a long shot. But for now, today, in this moment for the Mountain West, a long pause is the smartest move.

Because let’s face it: Each time you see Andy Garcia rolling gnocchi with Sofia Coppola, you realize “The Godfather, Part III” was a complete disaster.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 2 to 4 p.m. Monday and Thursday on “Monsters of the Midday,” Fox Sports Radio 920 AM.