In anticipation of Boise State's joining the Mountain West Conference, I always figured the critical question would become whether football teams would play eight or nine conference games annually in the 10-team league.

Somehow, that hardly seems like the major issue of the moment.

Friday's news that the Broncos are coming aboard ordinarily might serve as the summer's biggest development. Yet so much else is still in play locally and nationally that drawing any permanent conclusions right now is tricky.

My first reaction: OK, what's next?

Second thought: What made Friday so different from Monday, when the MWC presidents delayed expansion?

Another question: Before long, will Boise State administrators end up wondering what they've done?

They could find themselves feeling like Utah State, which longed to join the Western Athletic Conference and finally did so -- when Utah and BYU already were in another league.

Supposing the Utes and Cougars stay in the Mountain West, rather than move to the Pac-How-Ever-Many or the Big Whatever, then Boise State's arrival in the 2011 football season obviously becomes much more significant around here. If only Utah State ends up being affected, I still believe this is a victory for the Aggies, who no longer will have to compete with Boise State in a remade version of the WAC.

For the sake of today's discussion, let's say nothing else happens and the Broncos start playing with Utah, BYU and Texas Christian in the Mountain West as we know it.

That'll be good stuff, as long as the conference adopts a complete round-robin schedule and everybody meets everybody else every year.

The side effects of the nine-game conference schedule, as Pac-10 coaches have discovered, will be the imbalance of five home games and four road games for half the teams. What's more, the increased competition level makes going unbeaten more difficult for the top teams and becoming bowl-eligible more challenging for those in the middle.

With the Broncos in the mix, the Mountain West's current six-year run of having its champion win every league game is almost sure to end in 2011. That probably would mean no Bowl Championship Series qualifier from the MWC that year, with the trade-off being the greater chance of having the conference earn automatic-qualifying status for the '12 and '13 seasons.

Undoubtedly, Boise State is ready to play with the Mountain West's elite football programs. Anybody who watched the Broncos match TCU's athletic ability in the Fiesta Bowl knows that. For all of BSU's reputation for succeeding with tricks and gimmicks, the Broncos showed there's plenty of substance to go with their style in that 17-10 victory.

So their arrival will immediately double the number of must-watch games in MWC play from three to six. The Broncos already were booked to play Utah annually from 2011-13 and BYU from 2012-15, and now those games will have intra-conference impact.

Then again, the operative word of that sentence probably should be "would" as opposed to "will."

Amid all the variables around the country, picturing this 10-school alignment as any kind of permanent Mountain West seems unrealistic. That's another way of saying there's still hope of upgrading for Utah and BYU.

"Eventually," Utah football coach Kyle Whittingham said Friday, "everything will get sorted out."

So for now, Boise State's move barely registers around here.