Jovenitti: Reasons the Big East should keep its BCS bid

Let’s talk about Big East football again.

C’mon. Seriously, stop laughing.

Pitt —… Let’s talk about Big East football again.

C’mon. Seriously, stop laughing.

Pitt — the team that started the season 2-3 with losses to every single quality opponent it faced — has a virtual two-game lead in the conference.  And the league’s best nonconference victory is West Virginia’s home win against Maryland.

That sound you hear is SEC fans crying for the Big East to lose its automatic BCS bid. Currently, the Big East is among six conferences whose champion is automatically invited to a BCS Bowl. But the Big East’s mediocrity over the past few seasons is inviting questions as to why the conference should be considered one of the “top 6.”

The Mountain West currently looks like the conference poised to take the Big East’s place should Pitt’s conference get the boot from the BCS. Utah and TCU have made a name for the Mountain West, and America’s favorite underdog, Boise State, announced last summer that it would be joining the conference.

But when Utah jumped ship to the Pac-10, it hurt the Mountain West’s chances of becoming a BCS conference.

So for this week’s Top 10, I give you 10 reasons why the Big East should keep its automatic bid.

10. History. The Big East-conference teams claim 11 national championships among its eight members. (Sure, Pitt accounts for nine of them, but try not to think about that.)The Mountain West has only claimed three Division I-A titles. The Big East is in a rut, but nothing justifies throwing out a league with so much history. And this isn’t even taking into account the fact that West Virginia is in the winningest program in college football that has yet to win a championship.

9. Fan base. Sure, the Big East probably has the fewest fans of any of the six conferences, but does any other non-BCS conference have more fans? No.

Pitt, West Virginia, Syracuse and Rutgers all have huge fan bases thanks to their storied pasts. The Mountain West has BYU, Utah and TCU with big fan bases. But what does San Diego State or Wyoming bring to the table? Syracuse has been consistently awful for a long time, but its fans are still there and they still travel well. So even the Big East’s worst teams bring more money to the BCS than most schools in non-BCS conferences.

8. Who would be the resident patsy? For several years now, the Big East’s automatic bid has served one purpose: to provide an easy bowl win for the SEC’s or the Big 12’s second place team. If not for the Big East and Cincinnati, who would Florida have pummeled in the Sugar Bowl (aka, the Tim Tebow Bowl)? Playing a Big East team in a BCS bowl is a nice consolation for teams who can’t quite win their conferences.

7. The conference still needs time to heal. The Big East was doing just fine until Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech stabbed it in the back by jumping ship to the ACC. The conference had to scramble to find replacements to stay above the eight-team threshold needed to keep its automatic bid. Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida all came aboard from Conference USA.

Those schools are still building their football programs, and will obviously need more than just five years to become legitimate football schools. Once another five years elapses,  the BCS will be able to accurately judge if the Big East is still fit for a BCS-bid.

6. It would reaffirm that the BCS sucks. Everyone knows that the BCS is awful. If the BCS itself realized it made a mistake by giving the Big East an automatic bid, it would just prove to itself that it sucks. And honestly, who would do that?

5-1: Do not exist.

Yeah, that’s right. I could only come up with five measly reasons why the Big East doesn’t deserve to lose its BCS bid. (And remember, I’m the one who came up with 10 teams to eliminate from a conference with 16 teams.)

Sorry, Big East, I really tried to help you out here. But the football teams need to throw me a bone and stop losing.

But I guess if there’s one thing we can take away from the situation, it’s this: the Big East sucks, so it fits perfectly in the BCS.