Big East Football Pins Its Survival in BCS on Boise State

Boise State's football program has spent much of the past decade both dazzling and irritating fans of college football.

The Broncos crashed past the guardhouse of the gated community known as the Bowl Championship Series and twice earned a seat at the grownups' table. Boise State is on the verge of doing it for an unprecedented third time this season.

With Boise State off to a 7-0 start and currently ranked fifth in the BCS standings, the Mountain West Conference so far has proved to be little more of a challenge than the Broncos' previous stomping grounds, the Western Athletic Conference.

However, the Broncos are loved by some and loathed by others in the college football fan base. For everyone who admired the imaginative play calls in Boise State's seminal moment, an upset victory over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl in January 2007, there is someone else who makes the claim Boise State is a "joke" (or other pejorative) because it has to use trick plays to win.

And as far as the Broncos' bonafides for playing in the BCS' big game at the end? "Play somebody" appears to be the prevailing sentiment.

College football is very much a caste system, with haves, sorta-haves and have-nots. The role of the BCS in all of this is not to—as is often mistakenly believed—crown a national champion. No, the job of the BCS is to funnel as much cash as possible into the coffers of the haves.

So, while Boise State continues to claw its way toward national respectability, one of the conferences on the other side of the country that already has a home in the gated community known as the BCS automatic qualifying conferences is desperate to stay there.

The house is falling apart. The home owners' association could come with an eviction notice at any time. There is a sense of desperation mixed with panic in the air.

It has to be desperation mixed with panic, right? Why else would the Big East Conference look to Boise, Idaho for its salvation?

The Big East has taken some body blows over the last six or seven weeks. Syracuse, a charter member of the conference, is heading to the Atlantic Coast Conference and taking Pittsburgh with it.

West Virginia, the only football program in the league that could even generously pass itself off as a national power, is off to the Big 12. Depending on which reports you believe, Connecticut and Rutgers are actively engaged in trying to find a back door from which to escape the collapsing football conference.

That leaves the Big East—at least, at whatever point in the future the conference decides to let those three schools actually leave—in peril. Only five of its current members play football, well below the threshold of eight required to keep the BCS automatic qualifying bid.

And it's not like the league can just add anyone. If the quality of the conference dilutes too badly, the Big East could lose its AQ status even if there are enough schools in the league to keep it.

Still in question, of course, is when Pittsburgh, Syracuse and West Virginia will actually leave the Big East. The Big 12 is expecting the Mountaineers to arrive on its schedule in 2012, but the Big East is continuing to insist it will enforce its "Hotel California" rule.

That is, you can check out of the Big East any time you like, but you can never leave.

Conference bylaws call for schools leaving the Big East to provide 27 months notice. That means the defecting trio couldn't join their new conferences until 2014. West Virginia has already filed suit to get the 27-month requirement waived. At some point, a magic number of dollar bills will be determined that will make the 27 months disappear for all three schools.

It's not like the Big East has a huge tradition of football excellence. The last Big East school to appear in a BCS title game was Miami in 2002. Virginia Tech is the only other Big East member to play in the big game at the end.

But wait—neither of those schools is even in the Big East anymore. The Hurricanes and Hokies, along with Boston College, already left for the ACC in 2004. So, yeah, it's been tough sledding for the Big East for quite awhile.

Faced with the prospect of losing its AQ status, which would leave the league with all of the national relevance of the Sun Belt, desperate times appear to call for desperate measures.

That leads us to the potential shotgun marriage of Boise State—desperate for a conference that would provide it with an AQ conduit to the BCS without having to fight the fight of the outsider each and every year—and the Big East Conference, equally desperate to keep its status as an AQ conduit.

Navy and Air Force would also reportedly join the conference for football only, while Central Florida, Houston and SMU would bring their entire athletic departments to the Big East.

Will that combination of schools be enough for the Big East to keep its preferred-member status in the BCS, or will its graphite key card be taken away?

Given the fluidity with which conference affiliations seem to be changing these days, the best idea for fans might be to just stay tuned.

It might all be different next week.