Officially it is still called the Western Athletic Conference, but in football you sometimes have to keep checking to make sure.

More and more, it is looking and sounding like, as some are putting it, the Big Two and Seven Dwarfs Conference. So much so, it is a wonder it hasn't made it onto the official letterhead yet.

The two, of course, would be Boise State and Fresno State, the runaway leaders. The seven: everybody else.

That's the way the preseason football magazines have forecast it and, yesterday, some of the finest minds of our time, the sportswriters and sportscaster who cover the conference, weighed in with a concurring opinion. And the conference coaches may add to it with their poll today.

Two schools, Boise State and Fresno State, accounted for all the 57 first-place votes cast (43 for the Broncos) by the media. Equally noteworthy was such a wide differential between the second-place Bulldogs and third-place Hawai'i.

Yet, if there is hope for somebody to break up the Big Two this year, then it is probably going to have to be UH. If there is anybody to throw a monkey wrench into expectations, it will have to be the Warriors. Nobody is better positioned after having more to prove following last season's blowouts.

For all the excitement about the new WAC — and you are excited, right? — the expectations are for more of the same. Maybe a lot more. This in a conference where Boise State has won 26 consecutive games, the last three titles and hasn't finished below a tie for second since joining the conference in 2001. UH gets the WAC's first shot at the Broncos this year, Oct. 1.

Meanwhile, Fresno State has but two finishes as low as third place in the last seven years. Both teams could — and should — be nationally ranked when the polls come out next month.

This is about as stratified as the WAC has been since the mid-1980s when Brigham Young and Air Force — mostly BYU — threatened to separate from the pack.

The conference's new marketing slogan — "Play Up" — announced yesterday might as well be the motto for the rest of a conference needing to close the gap.

This is where UH needs to step up, mostly for its own benefit but also for the conference's. Only UH has that most fortuitous of scheduling anomalies — both Boise State and Fresno State on the home field — to have a prayer of pulling it off. What was a curse last year when UH hit the road to face both has the potential to be something of a blessing now.

For history tells us if there is one place you want to play the Bulldogs, it is here where UH has won five consecutive games dating to 1995. Even Fred vonAppen, whose number of WAC victories in three seasons could be counted on two fingers, somehow knocked off FSU here.

If there is a point at which the Bulldogs have been vulnerable, it is in the middle of their schedule. Right about, as luck might have it (Oct. 29), where the Warriors catch them again this year.

Boise State, of course, has been a Bronco of a different complexion. For them, the search for a solution goes on.