Let me take you back to spring 2003. The Iraq war had just begun, with no doubt that we would be in and out in a few months. The world had just begun to fall in love with a drunken, cock-eyed trollop who for legal purposes will be called Harris Pilton. And the Atlantic Coast Conference had a brilliant idea, have a championship game for football. Doing this would add millions of dollars in extra revenue, which would go back into teachers salaries and cancer research. Or funding the women's field hockey programs, whichever was deemed more important. The only problem was that at the time the ACC had only 9 teams when you need at least 12 teams, in order to have 2 six-teams divisions.

How would the ACC remedy this problem? They could have done the honorable thing and founded 3 new colleges in the region and waited 50 years for them to become viable football schools. But they took the easy way out and raided the Big East conference, and tried to do it behind everyone's back. To be fair it takes 2 to raid, and the 3 ex-Big East schools all felt that the ACC was a better fit, especially Boston College whose natural geographical rivals would be schools in the Carolinas, Florida, and Virginia. Anyway, the raid took the Big East's 2 biggest powers and another perennial contender. That meant the Big East was left with rebuilding Pitt and West Virginia teams, and a declining Syracuse team as their most notable reps. They then, in turn, raided Conference USA and took Louisville, Cincinnati, and South Florida. This may be looked upon as no better than what the ACC did, but the Big East did it more above board and more out of necessity than anything.

So what all of this means is that now the Big East is looked upon as the red-headed stepchild of the BCS schools. They were looked at that way rightfully last year when their BCS rep was a Pitt team that had no right being anywhere near the Continental Tire Bowl let alone the Fiesta Bowl and were subsequently trounced by Urban Myer and Utah. There have even been calls, mostly by non-BCS schools, to strip the Big East of its automatic BCS bid.

This is why that is unfair. Let's say one day, in fantasyland 2003, the Big East decided to add a championship game and stole Texas, Oklahoma, and Texas Tech away from the Big 12. What would the Big 12 look like this year? It would be far worse than the Big East, but because of the recent successes of Nebraska, Colorado, and even Kansas State there wouldn't be nearly as big a stink raised, and there would be very little talk of taking the automatic bid away. At the very least the BCS would have been too afraid of getting corn cobs filled with explosives mailed to them if they took away the automatic BCS bid for the Big 12, even without its top teams. And what if the tables were turned and the Big East just took Florida State away from the ACC? Who would be left? That's right, Georgia Tech, Maryland, and that's about it really. 

Also, who would replace the Big East? As poor as it is now, it's still much better top to bottom than all the non-BCS conferences. The most logical option would be an extra at-large bid. But after this year the Big East champion would most likely get that anyway. WVU and Louisville are right now top 20 programs, with the potential to be even better. Every other team in the conference, outside of Cinci, has the potential to be a perennial top 25 team. Hell, WVU is a very good team this year, and if not for their history of crapping the bed in bowl games I'd give them a 50-50 chance of beating Georgia. As it stands now it's more like 80-20 they'll lose.

I concede that right now, of the 6 BCS conferences the Big East is 6th in the power rankings, but not as distant a 6th as they're made out to be. All I'm saying is that they as a conference deserve a chance to regain their footing after being unceremoniously taken advantage of. If after 4 more years they're still sending sacrificial lambs to BCS games as opposed to contenders, then by all means bitch.