College Football Rankings: Coaches Poll Makes Us Ask Why Big East Gets a BCS Bid

While most of us focused on the teams that made the 2011 preseason USA Today Coaches Poll, it was hard to ignore a nagging issue that's been bubbling over for the last several years.

The Big East.

Once a respectable conference back before Virginia Tech and Miami bailed for greener pastures in the ACC, it's now down to its final threads of credibility. 

This year the Big East stands as the only major conference—those who's conference champions are awarded automatic BCS bowl bids—that had no representation in the first major preseason Top 25 rankings. 

With the SEC stealing the show with eight teams, the Big Ten and the Big 12 being represented by five teams each and the Pac-12 and ACC both getting a pair of teams in, the Big East is a shadow. 

It's gotten to a point where Boise State and TCU have more national recognition individually than the Big East does at a whole. And not to take anything away from Boise State's and TCU's performances over the last few years, but we're still talking about the Mountain West.

Remind me again why TCU is making the move to the Big East in 2012? 

Maybe it's because if the program can keep up it's level of play—no easy task after the departure of Andy Dalton at quarterback—TCU will be a perennial lock for a BCS bowl game. 

That's assuming, of course, that the NCAA continues to award the Big East with the automatic bid it's held since the formation of the Bowl Championship Series back in 1998.

You have to wonder how many more 8-5 UConn teams the NCAA will allow to play in BCS bowl games while top 15 teams like Boise State (12-1), Alabama (10-3), Nevada (13-1), Oklahoma State (11-2) and Michigan State (11-2) were relegated to second-tier bowl appearances last season.

But let's not stop there. Even as you keep digging through the mid-majors you'll find plenty of teams more deserving of a BCS bid than UConn. UCF and Tulsa to name a pair.

And while your first thought might be that you can't compare the records of teams like UCF and UConn because of varying strengths of schedules, keep in mind the Huskies didn't play a single ranked team throughout the regular season.

Once they finally played No. 7 Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, it was undeniable UConn was way out of its league, losing 48-20. 

And that's supposed to be the best one of college football's so-called premiere conferences can offer?

An average team that barley escaped conference play.

But hang on, what about Cincinnati in 2009?

There's no denying the Bearcats had an excellent season. Any time you win 12 games, it's hard to argue otherwise. But that doesn't mean you brush over the 51-24 loss to Florida in the Sugar Bowl either.

Or the fact that the only ranked teams Cincinnati faced in the regular season were South Florida, West Virginia and Pitt, teams that lost a combined 12 games that year.

It's not as if the Bearcats had an easy time with them either. Both the Mountaineers and the Panthers came awfully close to taking those games, losing to Cincinnati by a combined four points.

So while you can respect the 2009 Bearcats, do so with a grain of salt. Remember, Cincinnati went 4-8 last season, and you can only place so much blame on the departure of Brian Kelly.

Keep going back through the years and you'll find similar stories with Pitt and West Virginia, programs that owned an under-challenged and overvalued conference.

It's something college football observers have slowly caught on to over the last few seasons, but in 2010, it became a one-way street.

No Big East teams were ranked in the 2010 postseason Top 25. No Big East teams are ranked in the 2011 preseason Top 25.

It's time the NCAA stripes that BCS bid.