The Big East Revolution
Eat your heart out Abbie Hoffman. The revolutions of the ages couldn’t hold a candle in the wind of the Big East insurgency yet to come. However, instead of activist this movement falls more into the category of ‘proactivist’. It’s going to be huge and it starts right here. “Hey now it’s time for you and me, got a revolution, got to revolution”.
Big East football is tired of being undermined by the basketball conference. The Man (the conference commissioner’s office) reeks of basketball favoritism, a despicable act considering the positive revenue difference produce by the football schools. The Man is holding Big East football down by limiting just eight football teams (smallest in the FBS) to make up the conference while basketball enjoys a sixteen team field. This causes home football game profits to be marginalized since football programs practically have to buy a fifth non-conference opponent, yet they still produce more bling bling annually than basketball.
Worst of all is the mediocre reputation associated with Big East football, mostly due to its size. Like all other conferences, the Big East teams break down into tiers of football competence. The top tier is smaller with fewer conference teams presenting an appearance of weakness on the national front. This is an appearance not lost on Big East fans themselves. Attendance is frail, traveling for away games and bowls is pathetic (except for West Virginia). Bowls don’t want empty seats, therefore the big ones don’t want the Big East.
It wasn’t always this way. The football conference once flaunted formidable programs and almost always had a horse in the national championship race. The Big East was unable, or unwilling, to counter an ACC offer which included television, bowl, and conference championship game incentives. Since the teams targeted by the ACC had no bearing on the Big East basketball conference, Boston College, Miami, and Virginia Tech left. The Big East commissioner simply back-filled with C-USA teams. With college football titans and natural rivalries lost, so too left Big East football interest and intrigue.
It ends there, and it begins right here. This is how the Big East’s football programs move forward: The Big East football programs must secede from the Big East conference and become their own all-sports conference called the Eastern Athletic Conference (EAC). That leaves seven Big East basketball teams (Depaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, Seton Hall, St. Johns, and Villanova), and it leaves Notre Dame with a big decision. The beauty is that the new EAC is still a burly basketball conference with UConn, Louisville, Pitt, and Syracuse all finishing in the top 15 last season.
The new EAC commissioner should be able to secure the current bowl affiliations and automatic BCS bid with some quick maneuvering and fast talking because the newly formed conference has no ill effect on the current football product. Future bowl contracts will improve.
Once the secession is complete, the EAC must continue to be proactive, especially since recent years produced rumors of Big Ten expansion. It’s eat or be eaten and the EAC has to go on the offensive first. Notre Dame and Penn State must be given offers they can’t refuse. The all-sports conference is already on the cooker. That’s an attraction for Penn State. Geographical convenience also favors Penn State, and Notre Dame to an extent. Here’s where the deal get’s juicy. The EAC should offer Penn State and Notre Dame the option to play conference away games against teams with less than 50,000 seats at a neutral site for three of the traveling seasons, or until the stadiums are renovated to hold an excess of 50,000 seats. That means Penn State and Notre Dame would play Cincinnati and Louisville at Paul Brown Stadium, UConn at the Giants, Jets, or Yankee stadium, and Syracuse at Ralph Wilson Stadium. Not good enough? Notre Dame is permitted to keep their NBC deal. Penn State automatically qualifies for no less than three Big East games of the week for five years, a nationally televised perk.
The Nittany Lions will fit in immediately reviving the rivalries with Pitt and West Virginia. They would be playing on top of their recruiting base. Most away games are simple driving trips.
Notre Dame might not be such an easy transition. Other than Louisville and Cincinnati, the Fighting Irish would be jetting the course to away games. Every team would target Notre Dame as a rival; the Mountaineers in particular would hold a grudge, those don’t get dropped easily in the hills of West Virginia. The biggest issue confronting the Irish is the pecking order established during a season of conference play. The BCS belongs to one, maybe two teams based on conference standings. The Irish will have to adhere to the conference BCS rules, there is no more extended invitation with special qualifications. The back-up plan would be to take East Carolina.
The EAC would now equipped with ten teams. The newly formed conference would embrace the PAC-10 scheduling format and use the twelfth game to secure a match-up with each opponent in the conference. It is a formidable football conference with the expansion capable of competing with the best, as if it wasn’t doing so already. Perhaps the MWC will finally shut the hell up about bumping the Big East out of an automatic BCS qualifier.
The time is now. I’m calling on the volunteers of Big East progression to step forward and make your voice be heard. The EAC is not just a cause, it’s a dream for a new brand of football that suits its member’s needs and scratches the nation’s itchy intrigue.
