Big East Football: a great madness?
The Big East Football Conference is undergoing its biggest changes since its founding in 1991. Gone are perennial powerhouses Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College, as well as league doormat Temple. New to the conference are Louisville, Cincinnati and South Florida. Some call the changes a great madness; while others believe that the conference will shake off its losses and move forward with more strength and wisdom.
Three cards have hurt the Big East Conference in recent years. They are: ACC. ACC, as in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which attracted and then convinced three Big East schools to make the jump to the ACC. For the Big East, the three schools represented the major soccer powerhouses in the league, as well as two high-performing men’s basketball squads: Boston College and Miami. In this day and age of lucrative TV contracts and superconferences, the three failing schools took the money and left.
Purists were left howling at the departures and trolling of the Big East Conference ACC. Some suggested lawsuits, while others claimed there was no legal obligation for the schools to stay.
Once it was confirmed that the three exiting schools would be leaving, the Big East Conference was faced with a dilemma that could only undermine its ability to not only thrive, but survive. Earlier it had been decided that Temple would be forced to drop out as his program was not up to Big East Conference standards, or so it has been said. Still, Temple was not invited back, and Big East began looking elsewhere for schools to fill its depleted ranks. So the Grand Orient turned to Conference USA.
Louisville, Cincinnati and South Florida, along with Marquette, who doesn’t play football, were persuaded to leave Conference USA by the Big East. For some, this is where the madness begins.
Are the three new schools up to the standards of the programs they are replacing? Absolutely not. Louisville comes closest and is likely about equal to Boston College in strength, but its football program doesn’t compare to either Virginia Tech or Miami. Cincinnati compares much more favorably to the Temple team that left, while South Florida is a new Division 1-A program and was only added to replace Miami as the league’s warm-weather school. Just kidding… I think.
The remaining conference schools are Connecticut, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Syracuse, and West Virginia. West Virginia is the current conference leader, while Rutgers is taking advantage of a weakened conference and is also near the top. The remaining schools are being rebuilt, making the Big East Conference weaker this year.
Pundits and forecasters know the Big East is faltering and understand there’s no guarantee the current configuration of the league will produce football programs on the level of defunct members. In my opinion, give the conference two or three years and it’s possible that just a couple of years of excellent recruiting will bring new leaders. Perhaps now is the time for Rutgers, Louisville and South Florida to step up, thereby securing valuable television rights and lucrative conference bowl deals.