Is Big East Football Already a Zombie Conference?

Is Big East football already dead and we just do not know it? Is it really just a zombie thrashing around for a little while until it is dismembered?

In a recent interview with a local television station in West Virginia, West Virginia coach Bill Stewart discussed the end of the Big East conference. He envisioned a Big Ten expansion killing the Big East conference and leading ultimately to an end of Big East football.

Coach Stewart appeared unworried about the proposed changes and speculated that West Virginia would move to the ACC, Big Ten, or SEC.

Former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese commented on this situation as well this week to a Pittsburgh radio station , noting that the league was in "big trouble".

For Tranghese, the Big East lacks adequate candidates for football expansion. Such would be even more valid in the case of three teams departing the Big East.

The Big East Can Not Survive Another Major Raid

Big East football always seemed an odd duck in the college football world. The Northeast was long the land of independent football with powerful teams like Syracuse, Boston College, Pittsburgh, and Penn State heading down to New Year's Day bowl games and pulling off spectacular victories.

The era of the independents and outsiders died as Penn State joined the Big Ten and the SEC showed the way with having a 12-team conference with a conference championship game. The coming of the Bowl Coalition, Bowl Alliance, and BCS only strengthened the conference structure.

The Big East had great success as a basketball conference in the 1980s and saw football as a logical expansion of its market, especially in wake of Penn State's move to the Big Ten.

By securing the membership of Miami, the Big East made sure to make the elite of college football almost immediately, with one national championship and six top-ten finishes in its first five seasons.

However, with Miami's relative decline in the mid-1990s, the conference lost relevancy until Miami returned back to the top of the college football world in 2000. 

Football was always going to be second fiddle in the Big East and Miami knew this. Without Miami, it would have lacked football credibility. Without its valuable TV markets, the Big East would have earned second tier status long ago.

The ACC faced a similar position as a second tier BCS conference, its faced likewise tied to a former independent from the state of Florida. Another successful basketball conference, it envied the success of the SEC.

The ACC's Great Raid, while failing to help the ACC reach the top of the college football world, greatly weakened the Big East. Without the BCS changing the rules regarding BCS qualification, the Big East would have lost its BCS status following the ACC raid.

The reconfigured Big East has been modestly successful. While Syracuse has continued to be the laughing stock of college football, the other seven teams have been generally success, aided greatly by having only seven conference games.

Sure, South Florida has never finished in a final top 25 poll, Rutgers has one top twenty-five finish, and Louisville has fallen apart over the last three years, but West Virginia, Pitt, and Cincinnati have really done well, and UConn appears to be a developing program of note.

Outside of the issue of Big Ten raiding the Big East, the conference's biggest issue is the division between the basketball and the football schools. The football conference needs to expand, but can not do so due to the presence of eight basketball-playing schools. Outside of Notre Dame, which will never join the Big East for football, none of these schools is able (or willing) to follow UConn and move up to FBS football.

There are candidates available for expansion from CUSA's Eastern Division, but none of them have the prestige to help the conference maintain its BCS status. 

The Big East is still the Little Sister of the Big Six conferences, joining the ACC as the least respected of the six. Losing Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Rutgers will cripple the conference. 

The remaining five schools, even with with additions such as East Carolina, Memphis, and Navy, just would not be enough to justify BCS status. As both Stewart and Tranghese noted, the conference could not continue if the Big Ten takes three more of the original Big East football teams.

What Does It All Mean?

As such, the Big Six will become the Big Five. And if the Big Ten goes to 14, then other BCS conferences would likely also expand, if just to keep pace. An fourteen team ACC would likely include two schools from the Big East. The Big 12 already owns the name "Big 14", so it has been ready to expand for well over a decade.

The Pac-10 has been looking at expansion for awhile, well before the Big Ten announced it was seriously looking to do the same. The big driver here is TV, specifically the massive revenue that the Big Ten and SEC are getting from their new deals.

The SEC may stay at twelve, given it already is extremely successful. However, the SEC may join the expansion club just to keep up with the other major conferences.

The Pac-10 is most likely going to stop at twelve, given the lack of available targets in the West. The only team that could really deliver the Pac-10 a serious upgrade in its market value is Texas, and the Longhorns are going nowhere.

Given this, can the Big Five be Six again? Maybe. The Mountain West Conference has shown that it can is a big boy over the last few years, in football, as well as basketball, as demonstrated by the four teams in this year's Big Dance. 

But can the Mountain West survive both Pac-10 and Big 12 expansions? The Mountain West Conference will most likely lose Utah to the Pac-10 and BYU to the Big 12, and maybe one or two more. 

TCU is unlikely to be invited to the Big 12, given that the Big 12 schools believe that they already dominate the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Given that, the Mountain West Conference will most likely have TCU, even after the tidal wave of expansion. It can become the sixth BCS member if it expands now, before the other conferences act. A twelve team MWC should be able to maintain its status and membership sufficient to survive the coming changes.

In any event, college football is undergoing a major change and most of us will barely recognize the landscape of college football by the time it is over. Hopefully, this entire process will bring us closer to a college football playoff. Unfortunately, I doubt it.