Big East Shows us Exactly how NOT to Expand

In the past months, there has been plenty of rumors and movement of teams around the country jumping around from conference to conference. The SEC, Big XII, and ACC have all made some additions during the season, and it appears that they're all just as happy as can be. The SEC snatched up Missouri and Texas A&M from the Big XII, who filled the void with TCU and West Virginia. The ACC grabbed Big East teams Syracuse and Pittsburgh, leaving the Big East conference at the short end of the stick.

This is nothing new to the conference, though, because in 2004 the ACC poached Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College from the Big East. To fill the spaces left by those teams, the conference snatched up South Florida before expanding west to Louisville and Cincinnati. Read on about this horrible conference's expansion decisions after the jump.

So what do all these Big East schools have in common? It's not necessarily having a great basketball program (see: USF, DePaul). It's not even about having a great football team (Syracuse, Connecticut). It's media markets. Look at the current (for now) 16 teams in the Big East Conference and the markets where they reside:

Market Rank #	City	School
1	New York, NY	Rutgers/St. John's/Seton Hall
3	Chicago, IL	DePaul/Notre Dame
4	Philadelphia, PA	Villanova
9	Washington DC	Georgetown
14	Tampa, FL	South Florida
24	Pittsburgh, PA	Pittsburgh/West Virginia
30	Hartford/New Haven, CT	Connecticut
33	Cincinnati, OH	Cincinnati
34	Milwaukee, WI	Marquette
50	Louisville, KY	Louisville
53	Providence, RI	Providence
82	Syracuse, NY	Syracuse

As you can see, all these teams are in top-100 markets. And how many national championships? How many memorable BCS games even? And in recent weeks there have been other names surfacing for Big East expansion candidates. Here are those schools, with their media markets: BYU (Salt Lake City, #32), Central Florida (Orlando, #19), Houston (Houston, #10), San Diego State (San Diego, #28), Army (NYC, #1), and Navy (Baltimore, #26). The conference also pursued TCU (Dallas/Fort Worth, #5) before they got picked up by the Big XII.

And how many BCS games have those teams in question played in? How many postseason national rankings? How many even conference championships have those teams won in recent memory?

So let's look at the other conferences' expansions: How about the SEC, who has only four teams in the top 50? They looked West to add Texas A&M, the 131st largest market in the nation, and Missouri, who resides in Jefferson City, MO, in the 137th largest market. The other football greats in the conference? LSU, in Baton Rouge, lies in the #94 largest market. Arkansas is in Fort Smith, in the #100 market. Florida is in the third-worst market of all the BCS teams, as Gainesville is in the 160th largest market.

How about the Big XII? Their largest market, after Kansas City, which is Missouri's secondary market, is #45 Oklahoma City, which houses both Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. Texas is the only other school in the top 50.

The ACC has long been the Big East's rival in terms of media markets, but even they go for quality of teams before they work on money. Their previous additions of Miami, and Boston College are now their top two cash cows, but before that they relied on cities like Tallahassee, FL and Lynchburg, VA to bring in TV money.

To put it simply, the Big East has spent their football days chasing television money before they look at real football and basketball revenue. And yet again, they're prepared to take a gamble and add even more mediocre programs with a lot of television eyeballs, regardless of whether those eyeballs are even watching their local team. It's hard to imagine that a majority of New York City residents are making time on their schedules on Saturdays to watch a Rutgers game, or that people in Cincinnati are choosing a Bearcats' noon kickoff over Bengals tickets. Even USF has had games where they've had trouble racking up attendees. We've all seen UCF games on TV. When the camera cuts to that crowd, you'd think the game was over hours ago. UF owns the Orlando market as it is anyway. A good portion of the other teams share their market with an NFL team: Houston (Texans), San Diego State (Chargers), Army (Jets/Giants), and Navy (Ravens).

All I'm saying is that the Big East should take a page from every other conference's book and look to add teams for the quality of their football and basketball programs, not the potential quality of their television market on paper. Other criteria that should be more important are adding fertile recruiting grounds, history of programs, and maybe even the schools' endowments. The programs with a history of success, such as national rankings and bowl trips, are the ones that should be more attractive to conferences. And yes, I think we can all agree that ESPN has ruined college football for everyone, but we'll save that for another post.