Things That Make Little To No Sense

Plenty of things make little to no sense. You know, the BCS, republicans and democrats, skinny jeans, twitter...the Big East apparently looking into a conference championship.

Now, it's not the conference championship part that's so strange. From a competitive standpoint, I don't particularly agree with adding yet another difficult game to a schedule. In my opinion, that just potentially sabotages a good team from reaching a national championship game, where you can possibly run into the same team twice in a given year ala the ACC. But that's another issue for another time.

No, the reason this particular scenario is so odd is because, according to this article, they would apparently reach out oto the Mountain West Conference to play a joint championship game.

Somehow along the line, I missed how this would actually benefit the Big East.

Apparently, the Big East is afraid of losing its automatic bid with a Big Ten heist and feels it needs to send a preemptive strike of sorts, figuring that a shared bid is better than no bid. But in that case, the Big East needs to focus on other things to solve the football/basketball issue they have, rather than sharing its BCS bid. Those things have been discussed ad nauseum, but in case you've not seen/heard them, in the event of a Big Ten purge of football teams, the most common ones I've seen are:

1. Get Villanova's successful I-AA football program to move to to I-A;

2. Force Notre Dame football to be in or out;

3. Since an exit by one or more teams would remove some basketball members, the Big East could then reach out to teams like Central Florida or Memphis; and/or

4. Reach out to a team like Temple (yeah, I know it was kind of a messy breakup) or another team that may join the football league, but keep playing basketball in another league.

If a Big Ten defection or defections is/are expected, these moves make infinite more sense to me than tryng to share a BCS bid. The article discusses this being potentially a one-year idea, but why open the door? Say the MWC beats the Big East - good luck to the Big East in trying to explain why they deserve to continue receiving a bid.

A New Deal

Looks like the Big East has, deservedly so, locked up their BCS bowl guarantee for the next five years:

"It is all in place, the Big East is in for the next five years," BCS administrator Bill Hancock said yesterday at Big East media day. "There were standards in place, and the Big East proved it on the field.

"All six [BCS] conferences earned it on the field for that matter, and there was a pretty big gap between conference No. 6 and conference No. 7 in the ratings. It was a four-year [span] that was evaluated '04 to '07. Now the next four years will be evaluated to see if anyone else out there can earn it."

Personally, I didn't know what the criteria was for the Big East keeping their bid. But it's good to know that the folks making these decisions (however ludicrous it might be that there's no playoff system) are at least looking at the results on the field and not going with public opinion.

The Big East has been very successful in bowl games, particularly BCS games, where they're 3-1 over the past four years as the article notes.

And it's not just been the BCS games - they've performed solidly throughout the course of the entire bowl season each year, stacking up well against other BCS conferences:

2008 Season (4-2) - 3rd overall (out of six BCS conferences)
2007 Season (3-2) - 4th overall
2006 Season (5-0) - 1st overall
2005 Season (1-3) - 6th overall

Over the past four seasons that were evaluated, the Big East went 13-7. How does that stack up against other BCS Conferences? I was curious myself so I did a little digging:

SEC (22-10 / .688)
PAC-10 (15-7 / .681)
BIG EAST (13-7 / .650)
BIG 12 (17-14 / .548)
ACC (15-19 / .441)
BIG Ten (9-20 / .310)

The first thing that should stick out is despite the public's insistence that the Big East is a weak conference, their track record is solid, placing third of the six conferences. If ANY of these conferences should lose a BCS bid, it sure as heck ain't the Big East.

The next obvious thing is, man, I knew the Big Ten was bad, but didn't know they were THAT bad. 9-20? Even Prairie View A&M thinks that's a lot of losses.

The last thing is look how close the Big East is to having the best record - they're only .38 points behind the leader, the SEC. By contrast, look how much better they are than the worst conference, the Big Ten - They MORE THAN DOUBLED their winning percentage. That's unbelievable considering the relatively short time period we looked at.

Clearly, the Big East should be in no danger in the near future of losing a BCS bid.