Seems Sports Illustrated is talking about retro college unis. They cover 10 schools who they would like to see go retro — but Pitt isn’t one of them. Go get them, Lee.

You can sound off to them here. I don’t know what they were thinking with the Marshall, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma — which didn’t exactly have radical shifts. Iowa State they conceded went through dozens of changes and just settled on the worst example they could find. The Va. Tech was particularly bad.

I have to admit, though, I kind of liked the old Miami helmet.

Well Lee, it just looks to be worse than you thought. The Big East is going to do the worst thing possible.

The Big East plans to invite four Conference USA teams to join the league in 2005, keeping the conference intact after defections of its two biggest football programs threatened to split it in two.

Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville and Marquette will be invited in November, a source close to the expansion plans told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Wednesday.

Yes, that’s right. The Big East will stay united as a Mega-Mess-Conference. Two divisions, eight teams in each, sixteen teams total. The divisions would be split into basketball/football and basketball only.

It will be one hell of an unwieldly basketball power conference. As an 8 team, football conference, though, it will absolutely blow (the lack of archived links is Blogger’s fault).

Lee is worried that Boston College will be poached by the ACC, well the ACC is apparently shooting a little higher.

The ACC is having discussions with Notre Dame about becoming the league’s 12th member, with concessions to allay the school’s concern about giving up its lucrative independent status in football in the near future.
…
Meanwhile, Notre Dame has had membership discussions with the 11-school Big Ten, too.

Sources close to Notre Dame say the Big Ten hasn’t pushed the football issue as hard as the ACC, though it also would ultimately want Notre Dame to become its 12th football member.

This is not good. While I don’t think Notre Dame is going to the ACC, it could be using it as leverage against the Big 11 to keep the majority of its NBC football money if it would join the Big 11.

Getting back to the Big East decision to remain united. Why? Why? Why? Why? I’ve tried to be somewhat optimistic. I’ve tried to believe that Pitt and the other Big East football schools would finally understand that it is untenable to be a split conference.

But no. They have apparently drunk the kool-aid and are willing to create an unwieldly, geographically stupid, bloated league stretching from Providence, Rhode Island to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am disgusted, demoralized, despondent and depressed. No sir, I don’t like it.

It now appears that the last grasping hope for saving my beloved school from eventual college football irrelevance is a complete shake-up/revolution in the BCS system.

Shit.

In a move that surprised me personally, the NCAA has informally rejected the Atlantic Coast Conference’s request to waive the rule that requires a conference to have at least 12 teams before it can stage a football championship game. On Tuesday, Clemson athletic director Terry Don Phillips said “We got back word that the championship committee was overwhelmingly against waiving the current rule.”

I had personally thought that the NCAA would approve the ACC’s request in order to limit any further conference raiding of the type we all had to sit through this past summer (I would cite some of our previous discussions on this topic, but for some reason, our archives no longer work. Chas?). But no. So then Terry Don (Y’all can refer to me as Lee Charles) takes a few seconds of his life that he’ll never get back to point out the blatantly obvious next step.

“I think (adding a 12th team) would be where we need to go, if in fact we want the championship game.”

I think we can assume that the ACC does, indeed, want that lucrative football championship game. So brace yourself, fellow Pitt fans. Here we go again. So who is the ACC’s first target for their 12th team? Potential Big East member Louisville? UCF? South Carolina or some other SEC team? I don’t know for sure. But Terry Don does drop a hint.

“I think people continue to have affinity [for Boston College],” Phillips said. “I don’t know how they feel about us after what’s happened.”

@#%*@#% great. The chicken-fried, NASCAR-lovin’ bastards are looking at raiding the Big East yet again. Assuming that (1) Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese handles this situation as competently as he has handled everything else this year, and (2) Boston College thus leaves vapor trails bolting to the ACC, where does the Big East go from there?

My guess is, to pieces. At some point, the monster conference that mostly lies to our west (at least, all of the decent teams lie to our west, Lion Fan) is gonna get championship game envy too, and start hunting for a 12th team. Pitt, WVU, and Syracuse will all be considered, and as I’ve said many times before (where the hell are our archives?), I suspect that Syracuse will be selected (although Pitt will certainly make a strong bid).

But even if the Big Ten decides not to expand past its current 11 members (and there are many within the conference who don’t want it to), I doubt that a Big East Football Conference composed of Pitt, WVU, Syracuse, UConn, and Rutgers could invite in enough nearby Conference USA members in to maintain its BCS conference status. I suspect that we’d have to invite some far flung members in as well: perhaps Brigham Young, Colorado State, San Diego State, Northern Illinois, Toledo, or Marshall.

Although this might help us to maintain our BCS conference status, it would make us into the new Conference USA — a shapeless, sprawling mess that’s always under attack from other conferences who wish to expand.

So in conclusion, I don’t think that this is a good thing for alma mater, dear old Pittsburgh.

Hail to Good, Swift Ass-Kickings for Mike Tranghese (for not reforming the Big East Football Conference by now to make it more attractive to Boston College and everybody else), the ACC (seriously, why did you chaw-chewing idiots stop at 11 members this past summer?), those idiots in the Glass Bowl who damn near killed themselves ripping the goal posts down, and whoever is behind these vanilla flavored colas (THEY SUCK!!! OK!?)