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Daigneault: Big East on the outside looking in By Ed Daigneault Republican-American

College football's playoff system is still two years from becoming a reality. In the current reality, the Big East is still an automatic BCS qualifier.

At this point, that means nothing. Big East football used to run with the cool kids. Its membership in the trend clique is nearing its expiration point. The cool kids accept the Big East right now only because they've been told to do so.

In two years, the Big East will be clamoring to hang out with its former friends, but instead will be left mentoring the up-and-comers, those desperately trying to become cool without having the street cred desired by the clique. There are five conferences holding every bit of power in college football at the moment, and the Big East isn't one of them.

Right or wrong, that's the way it is. All the league can do about it is prove that it belongs. It might have an easier avenue to that if the rumors of a seventh playoff bowl game come to fruition.

The playoff will consist of six bowl games, which at first seemed like an equal opportunity arrangement. Not long after, the Pac-12, Big 10, ACC, SEC and Big 12 went into hyperdrive and signed contracts with those six bowls. Left standing on the door knocking to get in was the Big East and the other conferences who never had access to the BCS.

Ain't college athletics grand?

Now comes word that this seventh bowl will grant access to the Big East and its locked-out brethren. If a Big East team finishes in the top four, it will play in a semifinal game. Otherwise, the league will be relegated to the seventh bowl, but be fighting Conference USA, the Mid-American Conference, the Sun Belt Conference and the Mountain West for a spot.

Talk about being kicked to the curb. The Big East was part of the prom, now it's searching for a date. Sadly, this is a good thing. No access has become at least some access thanks to the work of commissioner Mike Aresco, who pushed for this seventh bowl game from the start.

Of course, the seventh bowl would be worth about $20 million, one-fourth of what the big one, the Rose Bowl, will be worth. And that is less money than the BCS handed out just for getting the automatic qualifier into the rotation.

Thank you, sir, may I have another?

The future does not look great. The current Big East, including the defectors in Pittsburgh and Syracuse, are 18-11 overall. They have five wins against BCS teams and four losses against non-BCS teams. The seven teams who will join the league in the coming years are 8-15 overall with no victories against BCS teams and six defeats against non-BCS teams. Included in there are Memphis and Houston, who are a combined 0-7 with five losses to non-BCS squads.

Ugh.

What is the Big East to do? Improve its football product. That means beating some of the big boys on a regular basis and even that will be slow to impress the denizens of the game who have already decided that Big East football isn't worth a darn.

The Big East has as many ranked teams as the

See BIG EAST, Page 5C

ACC. In Rutgers, it has the only team in the country that has won three road games. The Scarlet Knights won at Arkansas, but that is being dismissed because the Razorbacks have been awful One of the Big East's supposed bad teams, Pittsburgh, was blitzed at home by Youngstown State and thrashed Virginia Tech, a supposed ACC power, two weeks later.

Syracuse gave Southern Cal all it could handle. That was treated as an aberration because the Orange lost to Northwestern and Minnesota, Big 10 bottom feeders, and struggled against Stony Brook.

In essence, the Big East isn't great, but it isn't as terrible as the experts would have you believe. The "Big East is horrible football" cry has been shouted for years, and for those same years the national experts have taken to it like lemmings.

Guess which conference has the best bowl winning percentage since the establishment of the BCS in 1998? The Big East, with a mark of 43-27. Certainly, a good number of those bowls are lower-tier bowls, but that is only partly the league's fault. The perception of the league has kept the major bowls from entering deals with it, and the Big East can only play the bowls with which it has contracts.

The Big East does not have great football now, but it is not as bad as many would have you believe. Every league has teams that throw up stinkers. When it happens to the Big East, those get more attention. Problem is, evidence has been put aside in favor of opinion.

The only option the league has is to win games and hope. A few years from now, when and if the new Big East begins play, maybe the tune will change.

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