Reconstructed Big East Is Finding Itself Again
By PETE THAMEL

Published: May 1, 2005


PHOENIX, April 28 - Fountains bubbled softly behind him, and a desert breeze rippled through palm trees overhead. The scene at the Bowl Championship Series meetings Wednesday was a stark contrast to the tumultuous past year for Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese.

Tranghese and the conference were pummeled by the public and the news media because Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College - the Big East's top football members - defected to the Atlantic Coast Conference.

But things have settled down considerably. Five universities are prepared to join the Big East for the coming academic year. And Tranghese has fired back at the critics and expressed confidence about his league's future.

"The problem that we had last year was as we were getting bashed, no one had any clue who we were," Tranghese said.

When the Big East sent a mediocre Pittsburgh team to the Fiesta Bowl last season, some doubted the conference's ability to retain its automatic qualification status in the B.C.S. But Louisville - which finished last season No. 10 in the B.C.S. rankings while playing in Conference USA - will help the Big East forge a new football identity. Tranghese knew that Louisville - as well as Cincinnati and South Florida - would count toward the Big East when the B.C.S. re-evaluated its automatic qualifiers after the 2007 season.

"If you take a step back, and all of a sudden Louisville actually counted for us last year," Tranghese said, "I don't know how much yelling and screaming there would have been. It was a year of bashing, and we were trapped."

Six conferences - the Big East, the A.C.C., the Big Ten, the Pac-10, the Southeastern and the Big 12 - qualify automatically for a B.C.S. bowl game. A B.C.S. bid brings in more than $14 million annually and can make or break a conference.

Automatic qualification is essential for recruiting: teams in leagues that are not guaranteed a bid cannot in good conscience tell potential players that they can compete for a national title. The standard until last season was that conference champions had to have an average B.C.S. rank of at least No. 12 to retain that league's automatic bid.

At the B.C.S. meetings, more complicated standards for automatic qualification were revealed., and the new process should help the Big East.

Conferences will be judged over a four-year span beginning with the 2004 season and running through the 2007 regular season. The criteria will be the average B.C.S. rank of their champions and of every other member, and the number of its top-25 teams in the B.C.S rankings.

Five to seven of the 11 Division I-A conferences that thrive in these categories will get automatic bids for their champions in the 2008 and 2009 seasons. (The B.C.S. contract expires in 2009.)

The new system also includes an appeals process. A committee of eight university presidents may grant automatic qualification status based on factors like a conference's tradition, market size, television ratings and ability to travel to bowls.

"I feel very good about it," Tom Jurich, the athletic director at Louisville, said of the Big East's chances of retaining its bid. "I don't know of any other leagues out there to take our place."

Jeff Long, the athletic director at Pittsburgh, said, "We feel quite confident about our ability to compete and perform on the national stage."

The conference has earned respect nationally for the way it is handling the transition.

"I think the Big East has done some very good things in dealing with a very difficult problem," said Joe Castiglione, Oklahoma's athletic director. "They've responded well."

The defections have also had an effect on Big East basketball. Tranghese said any notion of the conference splitting because of its awkward size did not make sense.

He lashed out at conference basketball coaches who had wondered aloud about the logistics of scheduling with 16 teams and holding a postseason tournament.

"We're in this together because our presidents said this is what we want to do," he said. "It's unwieldy. It's going to be difficult. But that doesn't matter. Our job, and my job in particular, is to make it work."

He added: "Why would presidents make a decision to stay together when the environment would have allowed them to separate? We're rebranding. We've invited new people, new schools. We've restructured ourselves and our office. Those are not signs of a conference planning on breaking up."