Cubanbull Wrote:As I said NOONE is here negating the benefits of BCS status for USF. But your insinuating that USF didnt have anything worthwhile before the addition is incorrect.
As I said USF invested in an 18-20 million sports training facilities that includes stae of the art weight training room, football meeting rooms, locker rooms and training rooms.
USF has had a fantastic season with sell outs and over 50,000 in avg attendance but even while we were in CUSA our attendance was only surpassed by UL,ECU and Memphis. So while not great certaintly better than many programs with many years of tradition.
You seem to think that uSF and the others were only being succesful on the field and in upgrading facilities AFTER our BCS bid and that is incorrect.
By the way if our attendance prior to 2005 was ANEMIC then some of those other CUSA programs including yours were COMATOSE.

That's what tufinal doesn't seem to get. Cincinnati started working on their 100+ million dollar facilities in the late 90s early 2000s. There was no Big East slot in sight. USF was moving to C-USA and had good attendance, there was no Big East in sight. USF almost went to a bowl the year before entering C-USA, the only reason they didn't get to it was because Cincinnati happened to beat them out for it. Imagine that, the two "weak" programs who are only winning because of the BCS were actually battling for a C-USA bowl berth a year conference expansion happened. The biggest issue with the Big East was that only a handful of programs truly invested money in their athletic programs and facilities. Maybe if the rest of C-USA had invested in their facilities we would have been the ones taking the Big East's autobid. Afterall, C-USA was the undisputed #7 conference at the time, and we were the only non-BCS program with a seat at the BCS table (albeit a small seat, but a seat nonetheless). The main reasons that Louisville, Cincinnati and Memphis (and later TCU and ECU) were upset with C-USA was because the other football programs weren't investing in their facilities (especially basketball, which was our money maker since we didn't have BCS status or access to major bowls outside of the Liberty Bowl). Even ECU caught a little of the flack because of the lack of success of their basketball program, but they at least attempted to improve upon it. Even the successful ones weren't investing enough to maintain success in the long run. Instead of blaming USF and UC for being successful maybe you should take a look in the mirror.

This is the reason I get pissed off with some CUSA fans. Yes we were lucky that there was realignment and that the Big East had to expand but they want to make it sound like our schools were just going along fanning our asses just like all the other nonBCS schools and we were at random chosen to go into Big East. No there were reasons why UC,UL and USF were chosen over Memphis,ECU,UCF,Marshall and the others. Some want to wave it as it was the "location" well that was a factor but there were other pluses why USF was chosen over UCF. There were other reasons why UL and UC were chosen over ECU,Marshall and Memphis. Im not knocking those schools but as I stated before USF could had just continued going along like it was 15 years ago and we would be in the A-SUN right now. Our administration made the right moves and did the right investments to take advantage of the situation.
So while realistic that the BCS label is taking us to higher levels it will also be naive to presume that we just luckily ran into it.
In fact I would go one step further I remember USF's AD at the time we started football saying, "We need to field a competitive division 1A football team as soon as possible or we will get left behind in future conference alignments". USF knew full well how close we came from being left out when CUSA was formed and took steps to improve itself. Thats more than many other schools did which just continued with business as usual until it was too late.

By the way that thread:

http://www.ncaabbs.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=82989

Is hilarious. Because the same people who were burying the Big East in that thread are now crying because the Big East is a big bad BCS conference. Yet, to a man, they said that the Big East would fail even with a BCS tag.

LOL. I specially like our friend here TUFINAL4 saying we would lose BCS and that the CUSA champion would be higher ranked than Big East's . LOL

Cubanbull Wrote:LOL. I specially like our friend here TUFINAL4 saying we would lose BCS and that the CUSA champion would be higher ranked than Big East's . LOL

Don't forget TopCoog swearing up and down that the Big East would NEVER finish with a team in the Top 10 because they don't have the "talent" to finish in the Top 10 with the Oklahomas and LSUs. No wonder he has no credibility when saying the Big East will never split!

tufinal4 Wrote:I'm sure you'll love this reply, but if you put your Big East pipe down for just a minute and be objective, at the time those thoughts were completely accurate. The only defense ever offered by Louisville fans for allowing the Big East to take credit for Louisville's CUSA top 10 finish was "hey, they agreed to it." Whoever "they" was, so be it, but it was patently ridiculous.

I just realized you were crying about this awhile ago. And we told you it was the ACC who came up with this and you STILL blame the Big East and Louisville. I guess we'll have to inform you again. And carefully read the part where it says the deal was in place in the first month of the 2004 season. That means, at the time, the Big East was getting credit for unranked Louisville and the ACC was getting credit for #12 Boston College. In fact, Louisville didn't crack the Top 20 until Week 6 and didn't crack the Top 10 until Week 12 LONG after the deal was in place. I guarantee that if Louisville finished the season unranked or below the Top 12 ranking you and others would have been running around saying it was perfectly fair since Louisville would be a future Big East team and all. Why not make the Big East prove themselves! But because Louisville took care of business you cry and complain that it's unfair.

Playing the Game

BY DON CLEGG


While other leagues may play football better than the Big East, no one plays college football's boardroom game of power politics better than commissioner Mike Tranghese.

After a full season of listening to his football league being bashed by the national media on pretty much a daily basis as an example of what's wrong with the BCS, Tranghese let the cat out of the bag on another behind-the-scenes coup last week.
The national media pointed out several times during the latter stages of the season that the Big East's status as a BCS member could be in jeopardy.

The media was referring to a BCS rule that said a league's automatic bid could be stripped if the league champion didn't have an average finish in the top 12 of the final BCS standings over any four consecutive seasons.

Some media members even called that the "Big East Rule" under the assumption that it had been targeted at Tranghese's league.

The media baying escalated when Pitt emerged from the wreckage of the 2004 Big East season as the league's standard-bearer with a No. 21 ranking in the final BCS standings.

But as Tranghese noted in interviews with several newspapers last week, that didn't really matter.

Tranghese revealed that a deal had been in place with the BCS since the first month of the season that would allow the Big East to count incoming schools such as Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida in this year's rankings.

After all, as Tranghese pointed out, the ACC had already received permission to count Boston College in their rankings for this season - even though the Eagles played a Big East schedule in their lame-duck season.

As a result, Louisville - which finished at No. 10 in the final BCS rankings - goes into the books as this year's Big East champion for BCS computational purposes.

Swofford's Ulterior Motive

That revelation set off the predictable wailing and gnashing of teeth on the national scene, which only served to better illustrate the national media's ignorance and bias.

First of all, the current BCS agreement expires after the 2005 season and new guidelines will be in place for 2006.

If any team was to have its BCS bid stripped by this rule, it would have had to happen this year and it didn't.

The thing that caught my eye - but apparently flew under everybody else's radar - was that the ACC had opened the door for the Big East arrangement by asking to include Boston College in this year's rankings, if necessary.

Keep in mind that these conversations and arrangements were all being put in place during the first month of the season.

At the time, West Virginia was still ranked in the top 10, nobody had any idea Louisville was about to take off on the greatest football run in school history and Boston College had never finished higher than third in more than a decade of Big East play.

Why would the ACC think it was so important to have the right to count BC as an ACC team this fall?

Was there something there that everyone else had overlooked in the uproar over the Big East and the BCS?

As it turned out, there very well might have been - and it had a lot to do with that so-called Big East Rule.

I took the final BCS standings for the past four years (2001-04) and worked out the average finish for each of the six BCS conferences.

Here are the results, with the leagues ranked in descending order by their four-year average.

The final BCS rankings for each season are in parentheses, beginning with the 2001 season:

1. Pac 10 (3.0)

Oregon (4), Southern Cal (4), Southern Cal (3), Southern Cal (1)

2. Big 12 (3.3)

Nebraska (2), Oklahoma ( , Oklahoma (1), Oklahoma (2)

2. (tie) SEC (3.3)

Florida (5), Georgia (3), LSU (2), Auburn (3)

4. Big East (5.3)

Miami (1), Miami (1), Miami (9), Louisville (10)

5. Big Ten (6.5)

Illinois ( , Ohio State (2), Michigan (4), Iowa (12)

6. ACC (9.

Maryland (10), Florida State (14), Florida State (7), Virginia Tech (

Pretty obvious, isn't it?

Maybe they should have called it the ACC Rule.

According to these figures, if the ACC hadn't raided the Big East for Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College, commissioner John Swofford and his wild-eyed southern boys might have been the first league ever kicked out of the BCS club.

Florida State was 16th in this year's final BCS rankings. When you subtitute that number for Virginia Tech's No. 8 in the above listings, the best team in the ACC's average finish over the past four seasons works out to 11.8.

That's only a couple of places away from the magic number of 12.

That had to be what Swofford was looking at in Boston College's case. He figured that BC had a shot at going unbeaten in the Big East and finishing in the top 10 of the BCS standings.

Coming into the season, Swofford had worked the numbers and knew the ACC could be kicked out of the BCS mix if it didn't have at least one team finish No. 17 or higher in the final BCS standings.

Making the arrangement to include Boston College was just another way of hedging his bets.

I guess you have to give Swofford credit for seeing this coming a year ahead of everybody else and finding a proactive solution.

You also have to tip your hat to the guy for manipulating the national media into thinking the Big East - not the ACC - was the league in danger of having its BCS privileges revoked.

Not that he had to try very hard with the vast majority of chuckleheads who populate the national sports media



Funny how tufinal and others don't criticize the ACC for trying to take credit for Boston College's pre-season ranking. So if you think it's "patently ridiculous" go over to the ACC board and complain to them about it.

CatsClaw Wrote:By the way that thread:

http://www.ncaabbs.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=82989

Is hilarious. Because the same people who were burying the Big East in that thread are now crying because the Big East is a big bad BCS conference. Yet, to a man, they said that the Big East would fail even with a BCS tag.

Cat Claw, just read that entire thread and you know what the BIG EASTERS called it right. We actually saw the forrest through the trees.

We said the ACC pretty much blew and we actually gave them more credit then they deserved. The only thing we got wrong was we did not think C-USA would take this big a hit on the field. They still haven't recovered from the defections of TCU, UofL, UC and USF.

Boy, that thread was brutally wrong on so many levels. The Tulane fan has alot of nerves coming over here and complaining about USF, Louisville, Uconn and Cincy getting the benefits of being in a bcs league as the reason that they are so successful now. Not the way that he was so insistant in saying that any league with these schools will most certainly lose their bcs bid. What a clown.

I also enjoyed reading the idiot catdaddy's take on the BE losing its bid and calling out some of the BE schools. But some more rational fans brought him back down to earth regarding his own program.

I love the article written by that MWChump at the beginning of this thread. It's truly a classic. I swear I read it at least once every time fball season rolls around. Kinda like watching 'How The Grinch Stole Christmas?' is mandatory every year at this time of season. Can't stop laughing at how wrong the dude was?

Everyone who said UL, UC and USF, as well as RU and UCONN, are where they are because they put themselves in a position to take advantage of opportunities hit it dead on :007:
Louisville, for its part, hired Tom Jurich as its awesome AD while UL was still in CUSA. Some say that the only reason Jurich took the job was because UL was committed to vastly improving itself, with a new fball stadium in the works. It's been tireless work and spending, and coaches hiring, that put UL in a position to be an attractive candidate for the BE. Hell, Jurich was trying to get into the BE before the ACC raid was ever even a vague idea. Well before. And he was turned down by Tranghese at that time. But he knew that if UL worked hard, should an opportunity arise again, UL would be in position to take advantage of it. Clearly the same was the thought processes at UC and USF.

It's like with anything, put yourself in position to take advantage of opportunities, and then capitalize on them. But this is the most important, you must capitalize on the opps. UL didn't have any great fball history(we all know this) but in the 1990-91 bowl season, they had a very good Schnellenberger-coached team that made it to the Fiesta Bowl in part because at the time Arizona wouldn't declare MLK Jr's B-day a state holiday. Some schools(don't remember which) boycotted the state, including any bowls. But UL took the opportunity that put them in that position ... and crushed an Alabama team that won the MNC just a couple years later.

And again, we all remember last season. After UL lost to Rutgers, they were looking at a possible low tier bowl, but they won the rest of their games to stay in position, then when WVU beat RU, UL ended up with the BE crown and a trip to the Orange, where they took advantage again and walked away OB champs. One could well say that UL 'backed-in' to both of these situations, but that would be missing the point. UL put themselves in position to take advantage of opportunities, which constantly occur. Don't blink, or worse get lazy, or they may pass you by.

You recall one of the main point that MWClown was making in his ranting piece? Because a very good Utah crushed a mediocre BE champ in Pitt in the BCS game, his reasoning would have forfeited BE BCS membership. How silly that notion proved to be, as every one of the BE programs have stepped it up. And I know, but Pitt is about to turn the corner and the 'Cuse will get it going, never fear.

We're a damn tough conference because all the programs are committed to it, and with the old 'powers' (excluding BC of course) gone, the way is wide open for any team in the BE to climb all the way to the top. It's a tough climb, make no mistake, but the Opportunity is there.

To all my BE Bro's, CHEERS!