#byebyeTCU #BoiseStatePANIC! RT @SBJSBD: Big East presidents, ADs holding ‘pivotal meeting’ this wk to discuss expansion. http://ow.ly/32tQJ
#byebyeTCU #BoiseStatePANIC! RT @SBJSBD: Big East presidents, ADs holding ‘pivotal meeting’ this wk to discuss expansion. http://ow.ly/32tQJ
Looking at the Big East’s performance this year, they are not exactly negotiating from a position of strength….
They have an automatic BCS bid, and no realistic prospect of it going away. TCU belongs to the Mountain West, which doesn’t, and (sans BYU & Utah) has no realistic prospect of getting one. I’d say that puts the Big East in a position of strength, structurally. Judging by this year’s performance, they’re basically saying to TCU, “Join our conference and get a free BCS auto-bid most years!” And in return, the Big East gets… a good team! Geography aside, it seems like a match made in heaven.
I guarantee you, with the way the Big East is going this year, conference presidents and ADs have very sweaty palms about the potential for losing that automatic bid if they don’t make some changes to the membership.
BCS could ease its pain if it just added another game, the Cotton Bowl, and an auto-bid for the MWC along with it.
New affiliations:
Rose Bowl: Pac-12 /Big Ten(welve)
Fiesta Bowl: Mountain West
Cotton Bowl: Big 12(-2)
Orange Bowl: ACC
Sugar Bowl: SEC
Another big name bowl == more money.
More spots for more teams == less ammo for pro-tourney folk
The Fiesta Bowl would love that. Heh.
Really, to make that work, you’d have to somehow include a guarantee that the Fiesta Bowl gets a Big 12 or Pac-12 at-large, if one is available. If you did that, then maybe, though a more likely arrangement would be a floating situation where the Fiesta Bowl and the Cotton Bowl trade the Big 12 and MWC champs back and forth in alternating years, with the MWC-saddled bowl getting the guaranteed Big 12/Pac-12 at-large.
(Of course, needless to say, the other conferences would HOWL at that idea. So it’d never happen. Though maybe you could just give the MWC-saddled bowl perpetual first dibs on at-larges, period. But then Orange and Sugar would howl. Really, what you’d probably have to do is ship the MWC champ to the Cotton Bowl, perhaps with a guarantee that the Cotton Bowl can’t be forced to take a non-AQ qualifier — i.e., stage a Boise vs. TCU type game — more than once every four years, or something. The Cotton Bowl might be willing to accept that trade-off in return for BCS money.)
Really? You think the Fiesta has been dissapointed with the turn out from Boise State over the past few years? Those have been some of the highest rated games. But fine, give the MWC the auto-bid for the Cotton Bowl, or just give them a floating auto-bid like the Big East. I still think the Fiesta wouldn’t be a good fit for the MWC and I think they’d get the money/travel that they need.
http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/recap?gid=201001040085
Incidentally the non-AQ involved BCS games, Fiesta or otherwise, have far outpaced the current Cotton Bowl arrangement, so they may be ammenable to the change.
http://www.bcsfootball.org/news/story?id=4819384
I think the Fiesta Bowl doesn’t mind having high-profile, undefeated mid-majors as occasional visitors. But to permanently replace the Big 12 champ with the MWC champ, especially given that some years, we’ll be talking about, say, a 9-3 team that’s ranked #20 or whatever? No way would they happily agree to that, for the same reason that no bowl agreed to be saddled permanently with the Big East champ.
I don’t think it’d be that complicated to placate the Fiesta and Cotton bowl officials. Just like the Orange Bowl can take the ACC or the Big East champ, you could do the same with the Fiesta and Cotton, and they can choose from either based on the bowl selection order that year.
Well I was trying to be geographically reasonable, but since the Big East is eyeing TCU, and the Pac-12 can’t even find Utah and Colorado on a map I guess its a moot point. Still Cotton Bowl + MWC + auto-bid seems like a win for everyone right?
I don’t get the Pac-12 map brouhaha. It was pretty obvious they put dots where the cities were and logos elsewhere in the state, vs. the logos ending up in another state or covering up where the city dot would be.
I don’t know what you are smoking Andrew, but there were no dots on the map:
http://laist.com/2010/10/21/pac-12_announce_conference_alignmen.php
Okay, my bad. I saw this map in Brendan’s post on the expansion press conference and assumed it was the map that was being derided.
Heh, no, that map is from the Seattle Times, and up here in the Northwest we know geography (and that we are getting screwed).