Sports Watch
They're legitimate Heisman Trophy contenders and sure-fire National Football League first-round picks.
Jones rushed for 1,842 yards last year to break Marshall Faulk's single-season school and WAC records.
Harris, a returning Associated Press All-American, can become the first receiver in NCAA history to record three 1,400-yard seasons.
Besides Jones and Harris, other players in the new, 16-team WAC who will definitely play for pay in the future are wide receiver Will Blackwell and cornerback Ricky Parker of San Diego State; Wyoming offensive tackle Steve Scifres; defensive end Ndukwe Kalu of Rice; TCU center Ryan Tucker, and Utah safety Harold Lusk.
That's not counting Beau Morgan, the standout Air Force quarterback whose only option after graduating is the U.S. Air Force.
Still, all of the league's coaches and players at the WAC meetings in Las Vegas last week admit that they are frustrated by the conference's Rodney Dangerfield profile. In other words, they get no respect.
"There are great players and great teams in the WAC," said Morgan. "But we don't get respect we deserve. It's kind of frustrating at times."
THE new bowl alliance, which brought the Rose Bowl - and the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences - into an agreement to designate a national championship game, left the WAC even further out in the cold.
Despite coming out of a 16-team league, the WAC champion can only hope for an at-large spot.
The WAC champ will probably need to go unbeaten to get a major bowl bid. On the other hand, Notre Dame - that one-team conference - is almost assured of a major bowl bid even if it loses four games.
"It's unjust, unfair, a geographic bias, a direct affront," says Fresno State coach Jim Sweeney. "They knocked out the whole Rocky Mountain region."
Sweeney said he had some other words he could use and, at first, he decorously declined. He said it anyway and it didn't have a thing to do with the skin of a chicken.
San Diego State's Ted Tollner, who coached the 1984 USC Trojans to a Rose Bowl victory over Ohio State, concedes there is a bias against the WAC. After all, there's a perception that, despite so many talented individual players, the conference plays Frisbee football.
"We have to change that perception," says Tollner. "But you can't beg, you can't talk your way. You have to go out there and play those (nonconference) teams - and win. Our conference has to play our way to respect."
Unfortunately, it's easier said than done.
It's one thing to line up against the big boys of college football. But it's another to go head-to-head when the talent is stretched thin over the 4,000 miles from Hawaii to Oklahoma.
AND it won't get any easier if the WAC continues to get snubbed by the major bowls. Television doesn't only help exposure, it helps recruiting, especially in bringing in the bucks that pay for it.
"It's hard to recruit if you don't go to bowl games," says BYU coach LaVell Edwards.
Maybe Utah's Ron McBride put it the best:
"I don't worry about the politics. Then you become a politician and not a football coach."
As for the players, They hope to give the WAC needed exposure even if it means simply through their individual efforts.
In 1993, Marshall Faulk was the best running back in all of college football. Jones is now putting up better numbers than his Aztec predecessor. But don't compare him, says Jones.
"I want to make my own name. And maybe it'll help the WAC a little bit, too."