IRVING, Texas • While Mizzou cornerback Kevin Rutland called it 'suspenseful" and quarterback Blaine Gabbert said it was "hectic at times," MU coach Gary Pinkel on Tuesday for the most part stiff-armed questions about the school's precarious conference alignment perch last month in his first media availability since then.

Asked his feeling about the likely future of playing a full round-robin rather than a divisional format, for instance, Pinkel said, "Those decisions, they don't ask me. If I gave my opinion, it wouldn't matter. Those are conference decisions they have to make and institutional decisions within the conference.

"I leave that for those folks. I'm just trying to have a good football team."

Asked how a nine-game league format might affect MU's future scheduling philosophy, he said he would work with athletics director Mike Alden on it and added, "I really haven't looked at it much right now; I can't spend a lot of time doing that just because we're focusing on" preparing for the opener against Illinois on Sept. 4 in St. Louis.

Pinkel added that he had been "out of the loop" on whether MU might be invited into the Big Ten or how the Big 12 would survive.

"I was just kind of like you, sitting around seeing what's going to happen," he said during Big 12 pre-season football media days.

But as the numbers around him dwindled after a news conference, Pinkel acknowledged that the weeks of uncertainty had left him in turmoil.

"It was quite a time," he said, adding, "You have no control over it. You have none."

He compared it to the feeling of losing a football game — only worse.

"Your guts are ripped out and Sunday morning you wake up, you probably got two hours of sleep," he said. "But you know what you do. You brush yourself off, and you roll your sleeves up and you get up and start swinging: 'Let's go. Let's get going. Let's change this, fix this.'"

As he awaited closure on the issue, he said, "Day after day you get up, you feel like that. But you (couldn't) do anything."

BCS Bits: Bowl Championship Series executive director Bill Hancock attended Big 12 media days and said if USC loses its appeal to the NCAA regarding Reggie Bush, the BCS likely will vacate USC's 2004 national championship and won't elevate another school — on the premise that the game wasn't played so no champion can be determined.

In one of the most controversial BCS scenes, USC crushed Oklahoma 55-19 in that title game. Undefeated Auburn felt it belonged in that game.

"But how would they have done against Oklahoma?" Hancock said.

The BCS is entering its fourth four-year cycle, and Hancock said there remains little sentiment for a playoff among the 11 conference commissioners who make the decisions and quoted an American Football Coaches Association poll that said 93 percent of head coaches still prefer the traditional bowl arrangement.

And the plus-one concept, he said, essentially represents a playoff.

"No bracket ever stayed at the size it was when the event was created," Hancock said. "We call it bracket creep."