USF Fans - I think you can consider this an apology from Lonnie Wheeler -
USF fine for Big East, in hindsight
Column by The Post's Lonnie Wheeler
It was nothing against the University of South Florida. In fact, with its beckoning weather, its massive enrollment and its obvious geographical advantages, I didn't even doubt much that, someday soon, it would field a fine football team.
It just, to me, didn't seem so Big Easterly. South Florida wasn't winter winds and dark shirts and street-vendor sausage. It wasn't hoops. It wasn't hoary. It wasn't in the cultural footprint. In the context of Rutgers and Syracuse and Providence and Pitt, it simply wasn't a like-wired institution. It was the orange in the apple crate.
And so, when the Big East was in crisis and looking to regroup and turning to Conference USA for Cincinnati, Louisville, Marquette, DePaul and USF, I pled that the fifth was not such a desirable addendum. Fortunately, Mike Tranghese, the conference commissioner, saw it differently.
"South Florida was the eighth and final football-playing member we took," Tranghese recalled this week, as the Bulls prepare to host the seventh, that being Cincinnati, for what UC coach Brian Kelly refers to as an elimination match in the conference title chase. "It's a state university with 46,000 students in a hotbed of college football, surrounded by football players. It had made a commitment to build a training room complex. Put them in a league with an automatic BCS berth, and they have the right coach in Jim Leavitt ...
"I just said to people, 'Tell me why they can't win.' I talked to a lot of people, and the response I got was not about whether they could win, just a matter of how much. One of the people was Tom Jurich, the athletic director at Louisville. We had a very, very long talk about it, and Tom had the same reaction I did to USF. He thought they were just scratching the surface."
What Tranghese understood - and what the ACC had just made very clear -was the paramount importance of football to a BCS conference best known for basketball. Also, the importance of the Florida market for a league that had just lost Miami.
In a backward and brainy way, the commissioner recognized that there was buried opportunity in Miami's defection to the ACC, along with Virginia Tech's and Boston College's. The bully had bailed out of the neighborhood. It was time for everyone else to come out and play.
The upshot was that without Miami - and to a lesser extent, Virginia Tech - the Big East title and corresponding BCS bowl berth were now within reasonable reach of any member, old or new. And the conference has been rebuilt on that very premise. It has been rebuilt to the point of a 5-0 record in bowl games last year; to the point of 75 percent of its eight teams being ranked among the country's top 25 at some juncture of this season.
"The only thing I told all of them was that you can recruit to two things," Tranghese reflected. "One, the automatic BCS berth. And two, you can win the league. Because there isn't someone sitting in this room that has historically dominated college football for 20 years like Miami had. There are no other Miamis out there.
"To me, a giant is Ohio State. I don't think we have anybody in that stage. What we're trying to do is create eight football teams on the same stage. I believe that any one of our eight schools can win a championship, because they all have something."
As different as they appeared, Tranghese observed that Cincinnati and USF, in fact, sport something very similar. That's not to compare the Gulf breezes with the Ohio River's; but the two, as regions and cultures, do have football in common.
"Tranghese picked the right schools," Kelly said, with Louisville being the only easy choice. "He picked a school from Southwest Ohio that has a great and rich tradition in high school football and is a great recruiting area. He picked an East Coast team (Connecticut, which had been a partial league member for football) that has virtually no competition other than Boston College. He picked South Florida that's in a great recruiting area.
"When you put it all together, I think there were smart moves in that you wouldn't just have one team at the top and everybody else at the bottom. If that was the case, we'd have some major problems."
Instead of those, the Big East has West Virginia standing at No. 7 in the nation, complemented by a company of up-and-comers. After beating the Mountaineers and Auburn at Auburn, South Florida rose to No. 2 earlier this season. Cincinnati checked in as high as 15. Connecticut now sits at 16, catching the attention of a New York market that began only last year to notice college football, thanks to Rutgers. Louisville is the reigning champion of the Orange Bowl.
"I think Mike Tranghese deserves a lot of credit for putting this league together after it was virtually blown up," Kelly remarked. "I mean, it really blew up. And the story of having six teams out of the eight in the top 20 - and the two teams that haven't been there probably have the most tradition in the league, in Pittsburgh and Syracuse - I just think it's a remarkable story."
Actually, it's several remarkable stories. It's Rutgers. It's UConn. It's Cincinnati. It's South Florida.
And tonight, Rutgers plays at UConn. Today, Cincinnati plays at South Florida. On this date, the Big East prospers.
And from your skeptical correspondent, there is no more second-guessing about whether the Bulls belong.
"No one would have believed that Jim could have taken the program as far as he has in such a short period of time," is how Kelly put it. "But nobody knew what Google was 10 years ago, either."
Contact Lonnie Wheeler at lwheeler@cincypost.com.
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Cincinnati Post blogger Lonnie Wheeler on the BE...
