It’ll probably be the end of February or early March when the announcement will be made about which city – Chattanooga, Tenn., or Frisco, Texas – will host the Football Championship Subdivision national championship game next year and for some time beyond.

That’s next year, not this December, because the game won’t be played until January 2010 due to the expansion of the playoff field by four teams.

UM athletics director Jim O’Day in on the site selection committee and feels like the group faces a tough decision.

The facilities in Frisco, a rapidly growing community near Dallas, apparently are nothing short of spectacular, with – among other things – abundant practice facilities featuring virtually every type of playing surface imaginable.

The stadium where the game would take place is within minutes of the Dallas airport, another plus.

Chattanooga has made another aggressive bid to keep the game there, where it’s been for the past 13 seasons.

Two things that hurts Chattanooga’s chances are its lack of adequate practice facilities away from Finley Stadium and what seems to be dwindling attendance at the game from the locals.

One of the things that helps Chattanooga is its proximity to the East and Midwest, where so many of the contending teams come from, making travel for teams and fans alike much more convenient.

Should convenience of travel for a large part of the expected field of teams in the title hunt be a primary concern? That’s up for debate. I don’t believe it should.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a big concern for the NCAA, which sometimes has weird priorities when it comes to saving or spending money.

The expansion of the playoff field is another poser. The down side is that it drags an already long season out further for those teams that make the playoffs and puts the national title game up against a major FBS bowl game rather than one of the many lesser ones.

But maybe it’s an effort by the NCAA to provide some kind of boost for the FCS, which could become an entirely different animal – perhaps even an endangered species – when the moratorium on teams moving from the FCS to the FBS ends in 2011.

Would the playoff bone be enough to keep the division from imploding? That remains to be seen.

- Bill Schwanke