Clicking around on this board and other boards, the concensus seems to be to move St. Pete Bowl after Xmas and invite a good BCS team as an opponent. That makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand, why not start a second bowl in the St. Pete/Tampa area that would be PostXmas and feature a BCS team as an opponent? This would make for perhaps three Florida bowls for the BE, Gator, St Pete vs CUSA, and a new second bowl.

CUSA would probably have no worse than a second ranked team and, with UCF, ECU, Marshall, and Southern Miss, insure good attendance.

BE, especially if it adds one or two more teams, will need more bowls. Rather than destroying what it now has, BE should plan for a second St. Pete Bowl....with I think will be the undoubted success of the first St. Pete Bowl.

BIG EAST BOWLS:
BCS for BE #1
Gator/Sun for BE #2
Meineke for BE #3/#4
St. Pete Bowl vs BCS for BE #3/#4
St. Pete Bowl vs CUSA #2 for BE #5/#6
Birmingham vs SEC #9 vs BE #5/#6
International vs MAC for BE #7 or perhaps drop this bowl or move it to St. Pete

And, yes, I am a CUSA fan looking out for our conference's best interests....but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be a win/win situation here.

St Pete bowl has 10 yr growing period before any of these grand plans can take place.

more like 4 yrs, imo

Lets not forget that dome will seat 44,000. I can't believe new baseball stadium will be able to seat many more than 44,000. St Pete gonna need 80,000 seats to pay for SEC #5 vs BE #2 on new yrs eve & 5 million dollars.

I say St. Pete Bowl will be a huge success in its first year. It is a no brainer. UCF/Orlando had 52,000 for first CUSA championship game and sold out its new stadium for the third. Having UCF or USF in the neighborhood will insure this game is a sellout from day 1.

No disrespect to CUSA, Tallgrass, but Big East fans want to see more bowls against opponents from other BCS leagues. You are also not factoring in the possibility of a split. If a split takes place, UCF could end up with the Big East football schools, and then there would be no need to play a bowl game against CUSA in Florida when the Big Ten and Big 12 will likely have available teams to sign up.

The Big East will also get a better SEC opponent in the next round of negotiations. I have been told by reliable people that the SEC wants the Papa John's Bowl to succeed and may drop its #9 team to the Independence Bowl, especially if the Big 12 pulls out of that game, but maybe a CUSA team that gets bumped from St. Petersburg ends up in Shreveport with a second game against the SEC.

From a selfish point of view, I want to see this game changed as soon as possible to a BE/another BCS conf. USF will most likely be playing in this game a lot, and I don't want to see us stuck playing a CUSA team all the time. Can't wait for them to renegotiate this one.

BullsFanInTX Wrote:From a selfish point of view, I want to see this game changed as soon as possible to a BE/another BCS conf. USF will most likely be playing in this game a lot, and I don't want to see us stuck playing a CUSA team all the time. Can't wait for them to renegotiate this one.

From an even more selfish point of view, I'd rather we dumped the Pizza bowl altogether, add Memphis; get the Liberty Bowl as our SEC tie-in; get the Big 12 as our tie-in opponent for the St. Pete Bowl; and keep ND, GT, and Nova for all other sports to have a 12-team mini-hybrid conference that would make as much money as the current conference, but would actually increase payouts because there would be 4 less mouths to feed from the bb TV contract.

Then call it a day and keep our fingers crossed that no other cataclysmic conference changes come along to screw things up again.

But as for the latter, I highly doubt it.

All of the above was stream of consciousness writing in the moment.

Cheers,
Neil

templefootballfan Wrote:Lets not forget that dome will seat 44,000. I can't believe new baseball stadium will be able to seat many more than 44,000. St Pete gonna need 80,000 seats to pay for SEC #5 vs BE #2 on new yrs eve & 5 million dollars.

That's a good point. What would the seating capacity be? In a stadium primarly made for baseball, does capacity increase or decrease when a football game is played? I agree that you need to have a 70,000 seat stadium for matchups between two BCS teams.