Big East Expansion Effort Settles on 6 Perfect Schools to Save Conference

If you feel like mocking college football, there are a lot of things you can choose to target. If you feel like mocking college football's notorious corruption, go right ahead. If you want to mock college football's playoff system (or lack thereof), you can do that, too.

You can also choose to set your sights on the major conferences. Right now, the Big East is everyone's favorite whipping boy. Its members are fleeing like hysterical people from a burning building, and that's pretty embarrassing seeing as how the Big East is a major conference with an automatic BCS bid.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Big East has a kind of master plan in the works designed to save itself. Per AP college football writer Ralph D. Russo, the Big East is going to extend invites to Boise State, Navy and Air Force to join as football members, and Southern Methodist, Houston and Central Florida as members for all sports.

The idea is to get the conference up to 12 teams, split it into two divisions and then likely hold an annual championship game.

In so many words, the Big East is going to try to go big before it goes home.

The point is debatable, but I think the Big East is targeting a perfect set of schools. What the conference needs more than anything right now are schools with recognizable brand names and schools with recent football success, and it picked the right targets in this regard.

Boise State is obviously the big boy among the six invites. It has an exceptional football program, and the Broncos have made plenty of national noise in recent seasons. They are past ready to join a BCS conference, and the Big East is not a bad place for them to get their feet wet.

The other big one, I think, is Houston. The Cougars aren't known for their prowess as a football school, but they've become a regular in bowl games. Right now, Houston is No. 13 in the BCS rankings, and is looking to sneak into a BCS bowl.

Of the other invitees, Navy and Air Force have names bigger than their accomplishments on the gridiron, and SMU was a national superpower back before it was hit with the death penalty. UCF, meanwhile, seems to have outgrown Conference-USA and is also ready for the big-time.

Are these invites going to make the mockery disappear? Not at all. In fact, if this tweet from Football Outsiders' Michael Tanier is any indication, the mockery is just getting started:

When it comes to the Big East, stuff like this is par for the course.

But you have to realize that we're talking about a conference that is pretty much out of options. If the Big East could save itself by adding LSU, Alabama or Oklahoma State, it would. But since that's not an option, the Big East has to target the best schools it can possibly get, and it did just that.

Whether or not it will get any or all of these schools remains to be seen. And because of that, it remains to be seen whether or not the Big East will survive after it loses the members that have already announced their withdrawals.

But hey, the word from Dick Weiss of the New York Daily News is that good news may be on the horizon:

If they do, the Big East's future will get considerably brighter.

Essentially, the Big East will actually have a future.