Big East Expansion: Boise State Is the Key to Saving the Big East

Following the 2013 season, the BCS will meet and reevaluate which conferences are deserving of automatically qualifying for a BCS Bowl.

The SEC, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12 all appear to be safe as does the ACC, despite their poor record in those bowls.

That leaves the Big East who sent an unranked Connecticut team to the Fiesta Bowl to get blown out by the Oklahoma Sooners.

With Pittsburgh, Syracuse and West Virginia heading out and TCU never actually arriving, the conference is in serious trouble.

Cincinnati went to BCS Bowls in 2008 and 2009 but lost both of them, as well as their head coach to Notre Dame. Other than that, the last team staying in the Big East to be ranked in the Top 10 at the end of the season was Louisville in 2006 when Bobby Petrino was still the head coach.

West Virginia and Cincinnati have really carried the conference since and the Mountaineers are the only representatives of the Big East in the current BCS Poll. That said, WVU and Cincinnati’s only wins over teams .500 percent are Rutgers and South Florida who are 9-6 combined.

In order to maintain their BCS status, the Big East needs to bring in at least one heavy hitter and they have found their team out west in Boise State.

The Broncos have gone undefeated three of the last five seasons and are on pace to do so again in 2011. Chris Petersen is one of the most respected coaches in the business and gets the most out of all of his underappreciated recruits.

Considering how poorly the rest of the Big East has done in recent seasons, it would not be a stretch to think that the Bronco’s success would translate well into this conference, and it is widely suspected that they will join the Big East sooner than later.

Realistically, that is the league’s only chance at maintaining its AQ status.

Per the BCS, a conference must be in the Top 6 in the average highest ranked team, the “average conference ranking” aka the average of all the teams in the conference by the BCS computers and the number of teams in the final BCS Poll.

Adding teams like Houston, SMU and UCF help, but they don’t get the Big East over that all important first criterion.

While there are no set guidelines for how a conference should lose their automatic qualifying bid, it would be assumed that a conference would lose that status if it doesn’t match those goals over an extended period of time—something that the conference appears to be heading towards.

The only way to meet it is by bringing in the big guns and the only one available is Boise State.