Dion Lewis seems to think the Big East is number one. Unless he's telling me to wait one second.
With all of the big changes that are starting to take place in college football some are wondering whether the Big East is still a relevant conference or not. The Big East isn’t known to have many elite football programs, they don’t have huge attendance figures, and not having a conference championship is so 2005. It seems like half of the college football world believes that the Big East needs to be disbanded, while the other half believes that the Mountain West Conference should get their BCS bid. But with a 16-6 bowl record over the last four years and with some surprising draft stats you just might realize that the eight team conference is much more valuable than given.
The SEC is legitimately the strongest conference, they have the biggest attendances, they have the best defenses, and some of the scariest offenses. So why wouldn’t the SEC have the ‘better’ draft prospects. There should be no surprise that the SEC has had the most draft picks over the last three years with 125 prospects, which is over 30 more than any other conference. The next best conferences were the ACC (96), and the Pac 10 (94, although 1/3 of them were from USC). The Big East had 64. So why should the Big East be legitimized if they aren’t producing many pro prospects? It’s because of the averages. If you average the number of draft picks per team over these last three years you would notice that Big East had the third best average, which means the conference is actually producing a lot of pro quality players.
What about draft pick quality? If you look at the number of pro bowlers that have come out of the draft over the last five years you would see that once again the Big East finished last. But if you look at averages you would find that the Big East is almost identical in pro bowl potential to the Big 10, Big 12, and even the SEC. Sure the pro bowl isn’t something that can be predicted, but the fact remains that the Big East holds its own in pro potential.
One of the surprising things about the Big East is attendance. In 2009 the average attendance for a Big East game was 45,000. This is much lower than the 76,000 that the SEC averaged and the 72,000 that the Big 10 averaged. Without the higher attendance numbers it is hard to imagine a conference being able to have the money to compete in recruiting, and in technology compared to the bigger conferences, but again this is misleading. The attendance for the Big East attendance increased by nearly 4% last season which is extremely impressive in the current economy. If the attendance continues to increase then recruiting budgets, television demand and better teams will emerge.
As mentioned earlier the Big East has gone 16-6 in bowl games over the last four years, which is very impressive. Some will note that many of the games were set against much weaker conference opponents, but the Big East has fared well against BCS conference opponents over the last few years. Including bowl games the Big East went 9-9 in 2009 against BCS opponents. In BCS games we have seen the Big East win three of their last five bids despite being the underdog in most of the games.
So if the Big East is able to compete on the field on Saturdays and on Sundays, then what must be done to legitimize the conference in the BCS? The first improvement must occur in prestige. After the 2006 season Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino left his team after a BCS win to coach the Atlanta Falcons. One year later Rich Rodriguez left his team after getting a BCS bid to coach the Michigan Wolverines. And just this offseason Brian Kelly left his team out to get destroyed by the Florida Gators so he could take a position as the new coach of Notre Dame. The league is producing a ton of coaching talent, but the coaches are going off to bigger and higher paying teams. The conference must fight to keep their great coaching staffs, and this all starts with biting the bullet on higher salaries.
The second improvement would be to add additional teams to the conference. The conference will struggle to find a great list of teams on the West Coast to add, but there are solid teams to pick up. Eastern Carolina would instantly become a competitor for the team on the field and in attendance. Southern Mississippi or Central Florida would be other good candidates, and Memphis adds a Basketball power to the conference as well. The conference must add at least two teams to create a conference title, and they must find a way to compete.
The third and final major improvement would be to restructure the TV deal. The Big East holds quite a large market in terms of TV positioning, and if they could gain a major TV share of the New England area then they would be able to gain a major stranglehold on Eastern recruiting.
The Big East is a powerful conference that gets little respect because of size and because they just don’t seem to compete for a national title. But the fact of the matter is that the conference competes with each and every conference with similar results, and they are only getting stronger. With a few improvements and with a sway in financial power the conference could easily become the strongest conference in the NCAA. So maybe this season when you are flipping through the channels on a Friday night you should settle on that Rutgers v UConn game that is on because you might just realize that Big East football could be on its way to good things rather than bad ones.
