I actually had planned on doing a recruiting update today, but that will have to wait until Thursday now as it was just announced that the Big East conference has just expanded. The mighty conference that has its members jumping ship like it is the Titanic has apparently added five new teams to the fold. After the departures of Syracuse and Pittsburg to the ACC and losing both West Virginia and Texas Christian to the Big 12, the Big East decided to add the most obvious schools ever to their conference. Boise State (Boise, ID), Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX), the University of Houston (Houston, TX), the University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL) and San Diego State University (San Diego, CA) have all cast their lot with the Big EAST. This gives the conference ten football members as of now. Remember though, Connecticut is trying like hell to get out of the conference as well. Anyway, outside of the obvious geographical stupidity of the new conference, the real question here is; is the conference better now? The answer? No, not really. Boise State is a tough team that has made a lot of national headlines in the past few years. But then again, I don’t know that I think they are better than TCU, who never even played in a Big East game before switching allegiances to the more sensible (and stable) Big 12. Houston is a relatively strong football team too (finishing 12-1 this year), except for their blowout loss to the mighty Southern Mississippi Brett Farves. San Diego State brings their 8-4 record from the Mountain West conference, SMU brings it’s 7-5 record from Conference USA, and Central Florida’s 5-7 record from Conference USA will join in too. The funniest thing? Louisville is probably still no better than the fourth best team in the league next season.
Back to the geography thing. How do you think fans will feel about the 2,431 mile drive from new schools Central Florida to San Diego? How about the poor Husky fans? Their trip would be 2,950 miles from Storrs to watch their team take on the Aztecs. I know that the ever-changing college football landscape is all about money, but this borders on lunacy. What it does show us though, is the desperation of the Big East. In an effort to keep their AQ bid (which they should still lose anyway), they have added two good mid-majors and three average mid-majors to an already bad conference. This begs the question; did the Big East make these moves to strengthen their conference, or to weaken the non-AQ conferences to make sure that none of them sneak in and grab the Big East’s BCS bid? The Mountain West and Conference USA are clearly too weak now to be in consideration. If that was in fact the goal, then it definitely worked. If the goal was to strengthen the Big East, I’m not so sure. To whatever end, the people that should be the most furious right now are the folks at the Orange Bowl. I know if I was a sponsor, I would fight the Big East’s automatic bid with every fiber of my being.