Stephen Montemayor is a senior at the University of Kansas, where he will be the University Daily Kansan’s sports editor this fall.

Ah, Laramie, Wyo. Come for the Geological Museum – including a dinosaur exhibit! – stay for the guaranteed schedule-padding victory.

That’s what the Colt McCoy Show at Texas is counting on this year.

The Longhorns, expected by most preseason rags to advance to the BCS National Championship, will travel to Laramie Sept. 12 in the first game of a two-for-one contract with the Cowboys. This contract, and a growing number of its kind, continues a two-part trend in which BCS schools able to shell out the extra cash – UT>will pay Wyoming $900,000 for 2010’s game in Austin – and cashed-strapped small schools are willing to swallow their pride and offer their services to the highest bidder.

This decade Wyoming has been a lady of the night for big-time schools such as Auburn, Tennessee (the Vols shelled out a whopping $2.3 million), Washington and Florida. It’s not uncommon for back-to-back “money games” for smaller schools either. This year the Cowboys host Texas one week before traveling to Colorado.

In its nine-year existence in college football, the Sun Belt Conference has relied on big-time non-con opponents to survive and expand. This year’s opponents: at Florida, at Nebraska (three teams), at South Carolina, at Iowa, at Clemson, at Maryland, at Texas, at Alabama (two teams), at Texas, at Rutgers, at LSU, at Ball State.

Earlier this month, ESPN’s Pat Forde decried the lack of big, early season non-conference games. In the analyst’s eyes, quality intersectional matchups are shrinking like George Costanza after a dip in the pool.

Forde enlisted the WWL’s stats & information gurus to whip out a media guide and calculator to find that “over the past two decades, the number of Top 20 nonconference matchups has decreased by half every 10 years.”

While strength of schedule can be the deciding factor when comparing one-loss teams, a slate full of gimmes (Eastern Washington, Nevada, SMU, UMass) nearly led to an undefeated record for Texas Tech last year and took Kansas from 6-6 in 2006 to an Orange Bowl in 2007 in part by a non-con schedule of Central Michigan, Southeastern Louisiana, Toledo and FIU.

Conference expansion – annual chatter suggests that for the Big Ten it’s a matter of when – money and bowl games suggest that we’ll forever have to take in a few more laughers for every big-time matchup each September.

Highlighting this year’s non-conference offerings: USC at Ohio St. (9/12), Alabama vs. Virginia Tech (9/15), Georgia at Oklahoma St. (9/5), Oklahoma at Miami (10/3), Florida St. at BYU (9/19), Oregon at Boise St. (9/5), BYU at Oklahoma (9/5) and Nebraska at Virginia Tech (9/19) to name a few.

Ole Miss and Penn State may make the BCS discussion a bit more interesting this fall as the two have some of the softest non-con schedules around. The Nittany Lions get eight home games including their toughest opponents; the Rebels have seven home games but will likely have to topple obvious No. 1 Florida in the SEC title game.