Generally when you’re the new kid on the block, people throw open the doors and give you a big, warm welcome.

Not so with our beloved Aggie football team, which is joining the esteemed Big Sky Conference this fall, yet received a rude awakening when the league’s coaches and media types, in separate polls, predicted UC Davis will fare poorly when they start keeping score for real late next month.

The Big Sky, which year in and year out is one of the strongest Division I-AA (Football Championship Subdivision) conferences in the nation, has been around in one form or another for nearly half a century. Among its graduates are Boise State and Nevada, which have both moved on to the highest level of college football, Division I-A (Football Bowl Subdivision).

As school after school in California that used to provide football competition for the Aggies dropped the sport, UC Davis was sometimes forced to join conferences that had fewer teams than the number of fingers on your hand.

Gone are such familiar names as Chico State, San Francisco State, Sonoma State, Cal State Hayward, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, Cal State Fullerton, Cal Poly Pomona, Northridge State, USF, St. Mary’s, Santa Clara and UOP, leading to “body bag” games in the last several years against the likes of Cal, Arizona State, Boise State and Hawaii.

Finally, the Big Sky came calling and with it came instant I-AA credibility matched by an especially rigorous schedule. In addition to the Aggies, the Big Sky added North Dakota, Southern Utah and Cal Poly in the off-season, swelling the league to a top-heavy and perhaps unmanageable 13 teams.

All conference members will play only eight league opponents, missing four others each year, which is certain to create a competitive imbalance nearly every season. There’s simply no way around it.

The Aggie schedule seems to land somewhere in the middle on the degree of difficulty scale, with dates against perennial powers Montana State and Eastern Washington, but no matchup against those feared Montana Grizzlies.

The luck of the draw also paired the Aggies against Idaho State, a team so pathetic it can’t even win an intrasquad game. But, other than that October date in Pocatello, there’s not a patsy on the Big Sky schedule. That’s just the nature of the league.

So, when the sports writers who regularly cover the Big Sky got together with the league’s coaches to preview the season earlier this month in Park City, Utah, both groups issued polls that are always fun to revisit in late November after the last whistle has blown.

The coaches’ poll pegged the Aggies at No. 12, which is at least 10 spots below where they’ve ever been placed in any poll taken in the previous leagues to which they’ve belonged. Welcome to the neighborhood, you Blue and Gold warriors.

The media weren’t much kinder, rolling out the welcome mat with a No. 11 spot.

Two-time defending champion Montana State is first in both polls, followed by Eastern Washington, which won the national championship year before last. And if the Aggies thought playing on Boise State’s blue turf was strange several years ago, wait until they get a look at Eastern’s red turf come November.

The 2011 co-champion, Montana, picked third in both polls, has won or shared 16 of the last 19 Big Sky titles and regularly fills 25,000-seat Washington-Grizzly Stadium, but has been beset by numerous off-field problems and investigations, leading to the off-season firing of both the head football coach and the athletic director. The Griz will struggle as a result.

All of that aside, the worst insult to Aggie loyalists is that Sac State is listed ahead of UCD in both polls.

No doubt, the Aggies would love to hand their popular coach, Bob Biggs, a Big Sky championship in this his 20th and final season, but that will be a tall order indeed.

Then again, while polls are fun at this time of year, no one can say for sure what will happen once they tee things up on Aug. 30 against nonconference opponent Azusa Pacific.

But I guess that’s why they play the games instead of just “electing” a champion.

— Entries to the Contest to Replace the Above-Pictured Columnist are due by midnight Friday, Aug. 24. Entries may be about any subject, somewhere between 400 and 800 words long, and should be emailed to [email protected]. Reach Bob Dunning at [email protected]

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