Published August 4, 2011 - 8:22am
NEW: Discuss this topic in the Google+ community for SEC fans.
Every now and then I like to take a moment and flesh out the reasons and articulate why I dislike another conference. Today, it just so happens that I’m taking out my frustration on the Big East. I recently read an article about Big East Expansion – yes, a terrible topic – and I had so many thoughts run through my head while reading such as “This is a terrible conference” that I had to write this article.
Here are my five reasons why I hate the Big East:
1. Figuring Out Who Plays In The Big East Is Annoying
The Big East has 16 teams. The Big East has 8 teams that play football. Huh? Yes, that is stupid. TCU will make it 17 and 9 when they join the Big East. Meanwhile one of the 16/17 teams is Notre Dame who does play football, just not in the Big East. This is confusing.
2. The Name Big East Makes No Sense With TCU Addition
I understand the reasons for adding TCU into the conference. The Big East needed football legitimacy. But, this is just silly. TCU is in the middle of the country. TCU gets an automatic path to the BCS potentially, and the Big East possibly saves its auto-qualifier status in the BCS. Perhaps, the Big East should consider Montana as well.
3. Sketchy Coaches
I don’t trust coaches that stay at Rutgers despite getting job offers for the best college football programs in the country. Greg Schiano was one of the hottest names in coaching for a while. He decided to stay at Rutgers, despite Rutgers being a terrible place. Rutgers was 1-6 in the Big East last year and finished dead last in the conference. That’s what you call a major error in judgment.
Moreover, the West Virginia coaching personnel is downright hilarious. It’s a wonderful example of how the coach-in-waiting thing works extremely well. First the current head coach attempts to hire a reporter to dig up dirt on the coach in waiting. Then the coach-in-waiting gets booted out of a casino in the middle of the night right before getting named to the head coach position a year early. Awesome.
4. The Year 2007
If you’re a college football fan, you remember the 2007 regular season where it seemed there was a stupid Big East team ranked near the top of the polls each week. USF hit the #2 ranking in the country then lost three games. The country was briefly “gripped” by exciting Thursday night games which made the Big East participants appear to be legitimate teams.
5. Going To A BCS Bowl After 2010 Season Almost Bankrupted UConn
As we talked about last December, UConn lost a ton of money by getting into the BCS. The schools are required to purchase tickets for these games, and the tiny UConn football fan base wasn’t very interested in flying across the country to Arizona to play Oklahoma. It was a great example of how there should be some minimum requirements for an AQ Conference champion to meet in order to get into the BCS.
Reason # 6: The New York media embraces the Big East teams because they’re in their backyard & they just assume that football is like basketball, just another sport. (And Big East basketball is entirely overrated, too).
No way. The Big East in basketball is the same as the SEC in football.
In my opinion, there are only three conferences that matter in football. The NFC, the AFC, and the SEC.
I can see why it’s confusing for you to differentiate between 16/17 and 8/9; that’s high level mathematics in the South. And thanks a lot Mr. Obvious for making it clear that Texas is not in the Eastern part of the country. And if i remember right there were about 6 or 7 #2 teams go down in 07.