I quick note before we dive into this week’s Monday Mailbag — there will not be a Mailbag next week as I’ll be in Hawaii, so hopefully this one makes up for it. Thanks, as always, for your inquiries.

Generally speaking, major conference realignment happens every decade. The next trigger point for the future appears to be coming from the Atlantic Coast Conference, whose grant of media rights extends through 2036, although the buyout of that contract lowers to $75 million in 2030-31 where it stays through 2036. So, I would not be surprised to see major changes hit again in 2030-31, which also is the last year of the Pac-12 grant of media rights. The Mountain West’s grant of media rights extends through 2031-32, so we’re looking at seven years until the next projected major changes, which would basically be 10 years since Texas and Oklahoma said they were leaving the Big 12 for the SEC, which triggered the most recent changes.

It’d be naive to assume there will be no changes to the MW before 2032, although the grant of media rights the schools signed will make it difficult for anybody to leave for a non-Power 4 conference, and it’s equally unlikely a MW school gets a Power 4 invite. Yes, that’s what UNLV is holding out for and why it didn’t move into the Pac-12. I just don’t think UNLV is getting a Big 12 invitation anytime soon. I believe the Big 12 is waiting for the ACC to destabilize to pick off some of those schools.

To answer your question, I will project zero losses of MW schools through 2032 but changes thereafter. UNLV and Air Force seem like the most likely schools to leave. And while Grand Canyon has not officially entered the MW, I wouldn’t be shocked if the Pac-12 went after the Antelopes to pair with a football-only member (I’m not sure if that school has signed a grant of media rights with the MW, which would hard to get out of). Grand Canyon is really good at several key sports (men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball, softball) and in a big media market (Phoenix). It also bailed on the WCC before joining it, so there’s some precedent here if the Pac-12 tries to swoop in.

Here’s how I would rank Nevada football’s 2025 games from most winnable to least winnable.

1. vs. Sac State — 85 percent win probability

2. vs. Middle Tennessee — 60 percent

3. vs. San Diego State — 55 percent

4. at New Mexico — 45 percent

5. at Utah State — 40 percent

7. vs. San Jose State — 40 percent

6. at Wyoming — 35 percent

8. at Fresno State — 30 percent

9. at Western Kentucky — 30 percent

10. vs. UNLV — 25 percent

11. vs. Boise State — 20 percent

12. at Penn State — 0 percent

As for your second question, the three worst football programs in the Big 12 are probably Arizona, Houston and Kansas, although these things are fluid. Arizona State would have been on that list last year but won the Big 12 and played in the College Football Playoff. Things can quickly change. Oklahoma State went 0-9 in the Big 12 last year after being picked third out of 16 teams in the preseason poll (Arizona State was last in the poll). Utah was picked to finish first and went 2-7 in league. Generally speaking, the bottom-three teams in the Big 12 would be good enough to win the MW, although those three teams alone would not put the MW on the verge of an annual College Football Playoff spot.

Here are the games I’ve seen reported thus far:

Nov. 4: vs. Louisiana Tech

Nov. 8: vs. Pacific

Nov. 12: vs. Southern Illinois

Nov. 15: at Santa Clara

Nov. 18: vs. UC Davis

Nov. 27-28: at Palm Springs Invitational

Dec. 7: at Washington State

Dec. 13: vs. Duquesne

That’s nine of a possible 11 non-conference games. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a game against Oral Roberts, whose new head coach is former Nevada assistant Kory Barnett. As for the Palm Springs Invitational, there are 20 teams that will play in multiple tournaments that will be held at that site as part of the Acrisure Series. We’ll find out the full brackets next Monday. The tweet below shows the teams Nevada could be paired with.

There is a 0 percent chance of a merger, even if, in retrospect, the Pac-12 would have been behooved to take the top nine Mountain West schools and dissolve that conference so there were no exit fees. Instead, it took five plus Texas State. Things are too far down the road for a nine-school reverse merger since Texas State and Gonzaga have already been added. The Pac-12 doesn’t want a 13-team conference, which would be required with a nine-school reverse merger. That’s cutting the revenue into too many slices. The ship has sailed.

I think that will be allowed. I don’t believe there will be any contractual limitation in playing Pac-12 teams. Ultimately, it will help Mountain West schools to add Pac-12 schools to non-league schedules in a variety of sports, including basketball, baseball and softball. The goal should be to build NCAA Tournament-caliber schedules at an efficient cost. So, if Nevada can play San Diego State and Boise State in basketball or Fresno State and Oregon State in baseball or San Diego State and Boise State in softball to bolster their schedule with geographically smart games, they should do so. There’s no point in holding a grudge that will impact your school in a negative way. And I know you asked specifically about football, but it would be a shame if Nevada football never played rivals Fresno State or Boise State again over said grudge. Get over it. Duke it out on the field.

I’ll guess FOX becomes the Mountain West’s primary television partner with CBS also broadcasting some games. I don’t think CBS being the Pac-12’s anchor media-rights partner eliminates it from making a deal with the MW. But I do think it significantly shrinks the odds CBS is the MW’s primary partner. It would be interesting to see get ESPN involved, but it feels like ESPN is done with West Coast college sports.

Gonzaga doesn’t have a football program and Washington State football has mostly been bad (107-134 since 2000), so that wasn’t a prerequisite for those schools to get into the Pac-12. I did a six-part series last year about Nevada football’s decline, which included commentary on community support. That series was collated into one story here. So, I’ve written on that topic.

(Sidebar here, but there are multiple questions/critiques in this week’s Mailbag asking why I haven’t written about something when I have. I understand I write a lot of articles and nobody has time to read them all. But it’s pretty annoying to have people asking why I haven’t done something that I’ve actually done but you haven’t taken the time to read. OK. Back to the question.)

While people can blast Nevada football donors all they want, the issue here is with Wolf Pack administration. Nevada did not invest into football after its historic 2010 season. It took that as a great one-off season and started 2011 with four straight road games, including contests at top-10 Oregon and Boise State as well as a game at Texas Tech to kill all momentum from 2010. It didn’t use that season to build a must-need indoor practice facility. And despite having a really good Colin Kaepernick predecessor in Cody Fajardo, it didn’t keep up the Top 25-caliber winning. And when Jay Norvell got things going from 2018-21 as a top-three program in the Mountain West, it didn’t invest in him, his staff or his team, leading Norvell to leave for Colorado State, a program he had beaten one week earlier, 52-7. Do you think Norvell wanted to take over another massive rebuild? No. But Nevada made it clear — its administration and donors — it would fund men’s basketball at a top-three level in the MW but not football. That’s why he left, and Nevada is 7-30 since then.

Those were two huge missed opportunities in the last 15 years for Nevada football, which could have showed it cared about football and built on that short-term success to make it sustainable for the longer term. It didn’t do that, which, again, was outlined in this series of stories I wrote last year.

If the NCAA tried to limit college athletes to one year, it would get sued and lose. So, while I am in favor of such a rule to put some guardrails on player movement, I just don’t see that as feasible. I would like to point out Nevada’s last four NBA players (Cody Martin, Caleb Martin, Jalen Harris, Kobe Sanders) were all transfers while the Wolf Pack hasn’t lost a player to transfer who made it to the NBA. It’s overstated that transfers are killing mid-major programs. They’re definitely making it harder for fans to bond to players and programs. But I don’t think they’re killing the ability for mid-majors to land good players. Nevada football’s only draft pick in the last three seasons also was a transfer (Kitan Crawford).

I think his championship window has come and gone. John Smoltz is 58 years old, and Rick Rhoden at 56 years old in 2009 is the oldest winner of the American Century Championship. Smoltz had his shot in 2021 when he lost a late lead and then fell to Vinny Del Negro in a playoff. You can’t completely rule Smoltz out because he remains a good golfer, but I don’t consider him a true contender anymore. He’s one of the nicest guys in Tahoe year in and year out, though, so if he wins it would be a great story.

No, I don’t think so. The Pac-12 exit fee required to leave the league before the end of the grant of media rights (2030-31) is two times the annual conference paycheck, which will be around $20 million-$24 million. That’s not crazy money for the Big 12, which added Houston, UCF and Cincinnati despite those schools having an $18 million exit fee. So, that’s in line with previous additions. The Big 12 would pick the schools best for its conference regardless of exit fees, which will more than likely be the Atlantic Coast Conference leftovers. UNLV purposely did not join the Pac-12, in part because of a free exit to the Big 12. But I still don’t think the Rebels get that invitation in the next half-decade. If it does, then it looks genius for staying in the MW and keep itself unattached to a massive exit fee to join the Big 12.

Texas State is certainly more attractive than Wyoming. You could argue UNLV, Air Force, Nevada, San Jose State and New Mexico are on par or better than Texas State. But the Pac-12 adding the Bobcats wasn’t about adding the best school. It was about adding the best available school, which was basically a race between Texas State, Sacramento State and New Mexico State. The pickings were slim as the Mountain West schools were locked in its conference due to its grant of media rights and the AAC schools were locked into its conference due to a massive exit fee. Unless the Pac-12 wanted to chip in $15-plus million in an exit fee, it wasn’t getting its top choice of school, and since the Pac-12 didn’t chip in that kind of money to add the five schools from the MW, it wasn’t going to offer that deal to Memphis, from the AAC, for example. Texas State was the best option of not-great options to get to a mandatory eight football schools.

That photo is from 2013 when UNR students voted to approve $9 million toward the construction of a $25 million Fieldhouse. But the difference was never raised in private money, so the building was never built. The cost of what was originally pitched in 2013 would probably come closer to $45 million these days. It’s also worth noting the location of the Fieldhouse would not be large enough for a 400-meter track, which is why a 70-yard football field is being built rather than a full 100-yard field with the project that is currently moving forward. Ideally a track would be part of the Fieldhouse, but the cost and location make that untenable. There have been several iterations of the Fieldhouse, including in 2022 a $46 million facility that included an indoor track. But that was one scrapped for a more realistic plan, the one that is now moving forward, which has a $32 million price tag, although roughly $5 million of that is to resurface the playing surface at Wolf Pack Park and John Sala Intramural Field. You mention a future Mackay Stadium renovation and removing the track. I would be shocked if that happens within the next 10 years given the cost, so the track team will continue to have an on-campus place to practice in addition to access to the $5 million Reno-Tahoe Indoor Track in the winter months. Also, there is a location on campus that could house a track (you said there is not, which is false). It is on the northeast portion of campus above the medical school. If a soccer/track stadium is ever built on campus, that’d be the location.

Those Reno Rodeo Arena renderings came out in 2021 with a projected cost of $120 million that was first cited in 2018. The 15,000-seat outdoor was projected to open 2025 or 2026 at the earliest. There was really never a funding plan for that arena beyond “we’re going to need help from the community and hopefully our local, state and federal governments.” I’ve heard nothing about this rodeo arena project since 2021, so toss it in the bin of great renderings that never came to fruition, which makes GSR Arena moving forward an anomaly (and somewhat of a miracle).

There is a 0 percent chance the Grand Sierra Resort would have moved forward with building this $435 million arena if it wasn’t 100 percent sure it could relocate the AHL Tucson Roadrunners to Reno. That arena was and is being built, first and foremost, to be the home of the Roadrunners. It would not be built just for Nevada men’s basketball and a few concerts. So, while there might be some hurdles along the way, the end game is that AHL team moving to Reno one way or another.

You must have missed this story I wrote on the GSR Arena project officially breaking ground last month but not expecting to have an official groundbreaking ceremony until August or September. More details here.

We had Reno High alum and Oregon star pitcher Grayson Grinsell in studio last week for an interview that will run on tonight’s NSN Tonight. You can watch the full thing there or on the website tomorrow. I did ask The Athletic’s MLB prospect writer Keith Law about Grinsell’s draft prospects in one of Law’s recent chats and he wrote, “Drafted, sure, maybe. He’s 87-90 without arm speed, just a changeup/finesse guy. He’s not going high in the draft, and maybe he’d prefer to finish school rather than signing for $50K or something.” Grinsell was one of college baseball’s top pitchers last season (9-3, 3.01 ERA, 101 Ks in 98.2 innings), is left-handed and has a good frame (6-1/205), so he’s likely to be picked at some point in the 20-round MLB draft, which begins Sunday. But it sounds unlikely he’s a high draft pick. I’ve not seen him on any top-prospect lists entering the draft. But he could end up being an under-the-radar guy like ex-Bishop Manogue RHP Connor Noland, a ninth-round pick out of Arkansas in 2022 who is up to Triple-A with solid numbers (21-16, 3.90 ERA in 66 minor-league games).

As for Spanish Springs High alum Carson McCusker making his big-league debut, I wrote a full story on that here, followed up with a story about which local high schools have put the most players in MLB, tweeted video from our main Twitter account when we got his first big-league hit and put the hit on NSN Tonight the following day. I’m not sure what more you’re looking for here.

In 2020 during the height of COVID when sports were not being played, I published an all-time Northern Nevada baseball team for position players and pitchers. I also did so for softball position players and pitchers. I also did an all-time high school football team (offense, defense, special teams and coaches), all-time boys basketball team and all-time girls basketball team. I also did top-10 coaches in all of those sports. Might be time to update those lists.

Doubtful, although I did get a kick out of a public commentor during one of the GSR Arena’s city council meetings telling the GSR folks they should not build the arena in Reno and instead build an amusement park in Fernley. It was an all-time non sequitur. I imagine Great America closing in Santa Clara will just funnel more traffic to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo. It’d be cool to have an amusement park in Reno. I just don’t see where it would go. Maybe that public commentor from Fernley should build one out there. I guess there’s room up in North Valleys, too, although there are some behind-the-scenes grumblings there’s an attempt to build a pro soccer stadium north of Reno.

I love how “adding an NIL tax on tickets” is listed as a “new creative ways to fund college athletes.” For me, that’s a pretty uncreative way to bilk more money out of fans. But, yes, some schools have actually done that. Tennessee added a 10 percent NIL ticket surcharge and called it a “talent fee.” Nevada has a branded credit card with America First Credit Union, although money doesn’t go from there to NIL. Nevada must be creative to find new revenue streams to share with athletes. I don’t know how that’s going to be accomplished. Adding an NIL tax onto tickets is a hard sell given Nevada has struggled to sell season tickets as is, and last week was offering two single-game tickets for $20 for its first two home football games. That’s dirt cheap, so increasing ticket prices to fund NIL in the short term doesn’t really work. I could see that being done for season tickets in men’s basketball when GSR Arena opens in 2027 since that will be a hot ticket.

The matchups haven’t been announced yet, although San Diego State and UNLV are in the tournament, which rewards wins with NIL money. I’ve heard but not confirmed there might be some NIL money in the Acrisure Series, which Nevada is playing in. That’s a creative way to up NIL offerings.

I was concerned with how we would avoid accidents in the sky once everybody started driving the flying automobiles we were promised in The Jetsons. Now, that show is set in 2062, so we’ve got a few decades to go, but we’re not going to have flying cars by then. The best we get these days are eCybertrucks that are shockingly and depressingly ugly. So, my concern over flying car accidents will not come to fruition in my lifetime, which, I guess, is a relief. The Jetsons did correctly predict, it turns out, video calls; flat-screen televisions; robot vacuum cleaners; tanning beds; and capsule endoscopies, as this story points out. That’s not a Simpsons-level prediction of the future but solid nonetheless.

I usually get fruit punch, but I feel like that would wear thin due to the aftertaste, so I’ll go glacier cherry.

Two good faces, IMO. Our new dog’s faces reminds me of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who was an elite sock puppet.

Mario, FTW!

See y’all in two weeks!

Sports columnist Chris Murray provides insight on Northern Nevada sports. He writes a weekly Monday Mailbag despite it giving him a headache and it taking several hours to write. But people seem to like it, so he does it anyway. Contact him at crmurray@sbgtv.com or follow him on Twitter @ByChrisMurray.