Didn’t the Big East just win their last 2 BCS bowls, while the Big Ten just lost 3 in a row?

So, the current schools in the Big East, current CUSA, the Mountain West, Sun Belt – these are not respectable football conferences?

The ‘newest’ BE will never been included in the talk of the most powerful or relevant conferences to the BCS/the post-BCS layout, but – taking a step back and looking at the big picture – at $20 million a year, it is still a multi-million dollar player in the middle of the highest level of one of the most popular sports in America.

Regarding the choice of ~2003 (pre-the leaving of Miami, BC, and VT) as the point of it’s respectability, it should be noted that in 2007 a one loss Pat White/Steve Slaton-led WVU team was slated (no pun intended) for the BCS national championship game the last week of the season before being run over by LeSean McCoy in the last BE game of the year. The year before that, Brian Brohm’s 1-loss Cardinals probably would have landed in the national championship game, had they not been upset by Rutgers in the greatest win of that program’s history. Brohm was one of three outside Heisman hopefuls from the BE that year – Slaton finished 4th and Ray Rice finished 7th.

I guess I’ve typed up a eulogy to the Big East, so I’ll state what remains and rest my case. Since 2003 it was not a conference made of large, powerful schools that drove media dollars – what really mattered over the last 10 years. If you take a look at the Sagarin conference ratings over the last ten years, you will be surprised to find at least one year where the BE was ranked #2 of all conferences, and many where they were 3 or 4 – not just in the top 6. This was possible because, despite the fact that the conference could not hold its weight with monetary clout, it was resilient on the field. With all due respect to those schools and programs, there was rarely a 2-10 equivalent of BC, Duke, Indiana. The conference played great top-to-bottom football and garnered some impressive scalps (USF stealing a night game victory in overtime walking off at a ranked auburn comes to mind, my favorite CFB game of all time).

Anyway, RIP Big East. The little conference that could.