The Big East got another bowl tie-in.
The BIG EAST Conference has entered into a four-year agreement to participate in the EV1.net Houston Bowl and will meet an opponent from the Big 12 Conference beginning in the 2006 season. The EV1.net Houston Bowl is played at the state-of-the-art Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas.
The EV1.net Houston Bowl will be able to select a BIG EAST team after the league’s Bowl Championship Series representative has been determined and a BIG EAST team is invited to either the Toyota Gator Bowl or the Vitalis Sun Bowl. During any year when Notre Dame participates in the Gator or Sun Bowls, the EV1.net Houston Bowl will get first choice of a BIG EAST team after the league’s BCS representative has been identified. The EV1.Net Houston Bowl has the ability to choose Notre Dame once over the four-year agreement.
The Big East will send its #3 team to play the #6 team from the Big XII. The Big East needed to add another bowl, especially after the Toronto bowl plan was rejected for a San Diego based-bowl. From my personal perspective, this isn’t too bad since my sister lives in Houston.
Give Joe Starkey credit for creating two columns from the same theme. He has an ESPN.com column on Big East football and Mike Tranghese. Plus he puts a variation on a similar column at the Trib. Both are about Tranghese defending the Big East from the ongoing attacks of how it is unworthy to participate in the pure, noble BCS system.
Mike Tranghese is fed up with the criticism of his reconfigured football league.
The Big East commissioner doesn’t want to hear it from the media — though some of us have been unable to resist — and certainly doesn’t want to hear it from non-BCS conferences such as the Mountain West.
“They need to keep quiet and go prove themselves,” Tranghese said Monday in a phone interview. “If they deserve to get in (to the BCS), they’ll get in.”
Some might point out that they did last year, kind of demonstrably against the Big East. This year hasn’t been as good with their own C-USA refugee, TCU, leading their conference.
The ESPN.com article is a bit more detailed and Tranghese spins a new tale of how the BE got to stay in the BCS.
Tranghese insists there was no hocus-pocus behind keeping that lucrative BCS bid. He scoffs at charges of cronyism levied by those who wonder whether his power-brokering history put him in a position to curry favors. Among his many posts, Tranghese served as the lead administrator of the BCS (2002-03) and chairman of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Subcommittee on Television (1997-2001), where he helped to secure a $6 billion contract from CBS for broadcast rights.
“Everybody keeps talking like I did something to make this happen,” Tranghese said in a phone interview Monday, when asked how the league kept its BCS bid. “When we lost our members, we simply went to the others [in the BCS] and said, ‘You know what? You have to make a decision.’ They evaluated, saw that we were one of the founders [of the BCS] and recognized that the Northeast section of the country was a very good thing to have. And we made a very good case.”
No doubt they did take into account the media markets, but there is no sense pretending that Tranghese’s personal connections didn’t play a huge role in this. This is also strange, since a few weeks ago after BE Basketball media day, a story came out where Tranghese admitted he pressed the BE’s case to stay in the BCS for a year.
More interesting is his story on how Louisville got included in the BE BCS ranks last season when they were still in C-USA.
“I was obviously opposed to that,” Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson told the Orlando Sentinel last month. “Louisville didn’t play a single Big East opponent last year, and yet their great season is credited to the Big East. It makes no sense.”
Tranghese says that when the BCS “decided to give us a four-year opportunity” at a meeting in February 2004, it asked for the league’s “lineup” for the 2004 season. Tranghese said he responded by listing the teams in the conference that year. They included Boston College, which would play in ’04 before defecting to the ACC, and Temple, which was known to be headed into its last Big East season (it was kicked out).
“The Big Ten said, ‘No, BC and Temple are not going to be in your league [after ’04], so they shouldn’t count, because we’re trying to evaluate you over four years. Cincinnati, South Florida and Louisville; we think they oughta count,'” Tranghese said.
Furthermore, Tranghese said, “The Mountain West sat at the table and voted in favor of it, and now they’re bellyaching about it after the fact. They need to keep quiet and go prove themselves. If they deserve to get in, they’ll get in.”
Thompson, the Mountain West commissioner, did not return a phone call seeking comment. A Big Ten spokesman said Monday that commissioner Jim Delany was not available for comment and wouldn’t be until Thursday.
I don’t know. Call it a hunch, but I don’t see a lot of games being scheduled between Mountain West and Big East teams in the next few years. Skip the Trib article and read the whole ESPN.com article.
