How Will the Big East's 2013 Additions Change the National Recruiting Scene?

According to Brett McMurphy of CBS Sports, tomorrow the Big East will reportedly announce the addition of five new football schools—Boise State, Central Florida, Houston, San Diego State and SMU, with Air Force and Navy possibly joining the conference at a later time.

That means that the Big East is likely to recover after experiencing four major defections in the past few months.

After it was announced that Syracuse and Pittsburgh would be leaving the Big East and moving on to the ACC, and that TCU and West Virginia would be headed to the Big 12, many had started to wonder if the Big East, which has been a distant sixth on the BCS food chain for the past few years, would become the first major casualty of the latest wave of college football conference realignment.

Now, though, it looks like the conference will regroup and try to adapt to a new model in these ever-changing chaotic times in major college athletics.

Even though it’s certainly not ideal, the westward expansion is an interesting idea, and one that is going to open up all types of new recruiting avenues for Big East schools to explore.

While the five Big East holdover schools—Cincinnati, Connecticut, Louisville, Rutgers and South Florida—probably aren’t all that excited that the conference is now going to have a new foothold in Boise, Idaho, you can bet that they’ll all be excited that the Big East is set to have a presence in territories like Dallas, Houston, San Diego and Orlando.

Those are all fertile recruiting areas, and there’s a ton of talent to be harvested there.

In recent years, we’ve seen Big East teams really start building recruiting pipelines down to Florida, but now with the addition of schools like Houston and SMU, it looks like a new pipeline could be extended all the way down to Texas.

For a conference that was mostly based in the northeastern part of the United States (a region that doesn’t come close to producing the same amount of recruits annually as places like California, Florida and Texas), this is certainly welcome news.

While I definitely don’t think we’re going to start seeing a flood of blue-chip Texas recruits spurning the Longhorns and the Aggies in favor of schools like Rutgers or Connecticut anytime soon, there’s certainly enough under-the-radar talent for established Big East schools to find a few diamonds in the rough every year.

It remains to be seen how successful this whole new East vs. West model will ultimately be for the Big East, but one thing's for sure, this is certainly going to help expand the Big East's brand into new, untapped recruiting areas.