To all naysayers: The Big East will survive

Sporting News, The, August 9, 1999 by Mark Blaudschun

The annual media day was brief as usual. No golf tournaments. No three-day extravaganza. Just a brief dinner the night before and a fast two-hour interview session the next day.

Welcome to the world of Big East football in 1999. Not a lot of frills or fanfare to begin a season. Not many (if any at this point) marquee teams. Much has been said about this conference's future. Not much of it has been positive.

Then let us say it: The Big East is a solid football conference that will be around for awhile.

So if you're sitting out there in the Midwest and have visions of plucking off a Syracuse or Pittsburgh in some kind of fire sale when the league collapses or if you're down in ACC territory and have plans of going from nine to 12 teams with the addition of Miami, Boston College and Syracuse, here's a bit of advice:

Forget about it.

"In my mind, the Big East has never been better," says conference commissioner Mike Tranghese, who has conceded problems and concerns in the past. "I think we're on an upward trend. Maybe because we have schools that have diverse backgrounds, people don't think of us in the traditional manner."

Tranghese is optimistic for one primary reason: Miami. The Hurricanes may never reach the level of a decade ago, when they won four national championships in a nine-year span. But make no mistake, they are back to top 10 level and will be for quite some time.

Miami is essential to the Big East, Tranghese says. This may sound unusual for a commissioner to say when he must deal with seven other schools whose feelings may be hurt. But he is correct. The Big East has been ruled by Virginia Tech, Syracuse and West Virginia the past few years-but Miami is still the team the rest of the country identifies with and gets excited about.

More important, it's the team the folks at CBS and ESPN, who write the checks for television contracts that fund Big East football, get excited about.

Miami, under Butch Davis, has bounced back from the painful days of probation a few years ago when the program had fewer than 60 scholarship athletes on its roster and could barely compete in the Big East, much less on a national level. The Hurricanes have not finished in the top 10 since '94, but with 17 starters back from last year's 9-3 team, there is a reason for optimism. With a schedule that includes Ohio State, Penn State and Florida State, that enthusiasm may be tempered a bit for the first several weeks if the Hurricanes stumble.

The Big East made a monumental blunder a decade ago when it could not find a way to include Penn State-which was begging to join an Eastern-based conference-in its plans. Imagine a league in which Miami-Penn State, Penn State-Syracuse and Penn State-Pittsburgh were part of the annual football menu.

That window of opportunity is now dosed. So the Big East must hope Miami becomes stronger. It must hope Virginia Tech continues its run of top 20 seasons. It also must hope that struggling programs at Pittsburgh and Boston College can bounce back to respectability.

There will be worries over the plight of Rutgers and Temple-and perhaps there are no solutions to those problems. But the SEC has Vanderbilt, the Pac-10 has Oregon State and the Big 12 has Baylor. So the Big East is not unique in having programs that are anchored at the bottom.

The Big East will be fine. The new television contract it signs in a few years will ensure that. And it will play football that will be entertaining and competitive.

Just like the other major conferences.

New York Jets coach Bill Parcells has always made a point of saying, "You are what you are," when describing potential and expectations.

So it is with the Big East. It's not great. But it's not horrible. It's a conference in which the schools that play football in the East can compete for a championship and some bowl bids.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

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