Football in the Northeast
In 2005, the Big East – long a basketball-heavy conference – lost three of its five traditionally strong football programs to the ACC, while one of the remaining two, Syracuse, had fallen on desperate times. To remain a viable football conference (and retain its BCS status) the league was forced to raid Conference USA and managed to land three basketball-heavy schools with football programs. In the case of Louisville, the football program was even pretty strong, coming off an 11-1 season in 2004. Still, the conventional wisdom at the time was that South Florida, Louisville, and Cincinnati were far-from-adequate replacements for Virginia Tech, BC, and Miami and that the Big East’s days as a BCS conference were numbered. Meanwhile, the ACC was expected to be entering a period of dominance with its new additions that would make it every bit as strong a football conference as the SEC.
This is now the fifth season since that realignment occured. The first season, 2005, went pretty much as everyone expected, with 2 ACC teams in the final top 10 of the BCS rankings, and West Virginia the highest ranked Big East team at 11, and only Louisville joining it in the final top 25. But in all but one of the four years since then, the Big East has not only consistently demonstrated that it is a strong football conference, it has even arguably been better than ACC, especially considering its substantially smaller number of teams.
November 10, 2009 24 Comments
