Conference USA, resigned to the fact that it will lose it’s 4 best basketball programs (and 3 of its 4 best football programs) to the Big East — Louisville, Cincinnati, DePaul, Marquette, and probably South Florida — is doing its own raiding.

Rice, Southern Methodist and Tulsa will leave the Western Athletic Conference to join Conference USA, presidents from two of the schools said Friday.

This is being done (1) to keep TCU from leaving for the Mountain West, and (2) so these schools can play more central time zone games.

Marshall appears to be poised for an invitation as well.

For Pitt and the short term, this is a good thing.

I think it is clear that Pitt will be in the Big East for at least 3-5 more years. (Even if the Big 11 does expand and invites Pitt, it will take some time before it all happens.) In this time period, the BCS will expand and change — the Big East will lose its automatic bid, but there will be an at-large bid specifically reserved for some of the other conferences. This is the best that can be hoped for right now, and it may for a while placate some of the non-BCS conferences.

The way I’d like to see the other BCS bid be offered is to just a few conferences — say Big East, Mountain West, and maybe C-USA or the MAC. Ideally, TCU would still leave for Mountain West, effectively cutting C-USA completely out of the BCS picture. Like I said, I’m looking at making the best of a bad situation.

OF course one thing Pitt has to do, is up it’s non-conference cupcake schedule. The problem is, that Pitt is working at a tier of just above a mid-major. Good luck in getting the schools from the BCS conferences to play home-and-home games.

Therefore, looking at this scenario, the best way to do it is to play teams in a similar position — some of the good Mountain West teams — BYU, Utah, Air Force and Colorado St.

This is something Pitt has to be doing right now in working out the schedule. Play real competition.