Let’s just call it what it is at this point; the Big East Conference has become a compilation of reject garbage teams that the major conferences did not want.  The Big East has been raided time and time again when conference expansion has come around, and they keep replacing the good teams with lower and lower caliber football and basketball teams.  I’m just as tired of hearing about it as anybody else.

This time around, the Big East is in talks with Air Force, Army and BYU, to see who could become the 14th member, and may end up adding all three to get to 16.  Quite honestly, as bad as Army is, at least they make sense from a location stand point.  But would Army, Air Force or BYU then stay in the Big East for football only?  Or would they become full conference members?  An even funnier part about this situation is the conference thought about changing their name because of their new expansion, but then decided that it would affect their “branding.”  Get real guys.

That’s my biggest pet peeve about all of the conference realignment.  Teams picking and choosing which sports they want to be apart of which conference.  For hockey it’s fine, because the Big Ten is the only one with a hockey conference and that only starts in fall/winter 2013.  For the rest of the teams, if you want to join a notable football conference in order to get a slice of the TV contract pie, you should be forced to join for all sports.  Now this would probably bankrupt a lot of athletic departments, but it would serve them right for chasing the money all the time.

And sure, that’s what needs to be done in order to stay competitive with recruiting and to be able to support your other sports, but I still don’t see how travelling across the country once a week can possibly help your athletic department make money in order to help those other sports.  Seriously, how is Houston going to support their athletic department when they have to travel to Connecticut to play a road game on a Saturday.  Then again, since it’s the Big East, it will probably be a Thursday night, which means a whole day of missed class and money spent on chartering planes.  Money may be driving the shifts, but I can’t imagine that planning and logic are.

It’s too bad that nothing of this is going to come to a close any time soon.  A conference like the Big East is going to see more and more turnover year after year, when one of the five major conferences looks to expand.  With the development of lucrative TV contracts from the mothership, it seems that the future holds nothing but a continuously changing conference make up.

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