MORGANTOWN - There are plenty of good reasons for adding TCU to the membership of the Big East Conference, not the least of which is to begin the process of propping up a football collective that has seemed to go out of its way to shoot itself in the foot all season long.
MORGANTOWN - There are plenty of good reasons for adding TCU to the membership of the Big East Conference, not the least of which is to begin the process of propping up a football collective that has seemed to go out of its way to shoot itself in the foot all season long.
Is it a bit of a gamble? Well, sure. We're not talking about adding an entrenched football commodity here.
Yes, since 2000 the Horned Frogs have won 10 or more games eight times. There is still a chance that by the end of the week they could find themselves in the BCS title game. No current Big East team comes close to matching that 11-year resume. West Virginia and Cincinnati come closest, each with three seasons of 10-plus wins and one last-week shot at a national championship game - WVU in 2007 and UC last season.
Shoot, the eight current Big East football members combined have only 11 double-figure-win seasons since 2000 (WVU, Cincinnati and Louisville have three, Pitt and Syracuse one each).
But this is not exactly like adding Nebraska to the Big Ten, is it? Between 1960 and 1999, TCU shared one conference title and spent a total of five weeks over two seasons in the Associated Press Top 25.
(By the way, one of those two ranked teams, in 1984, you may remember. Jim Wacker's bunch started 8-1 to get to as high as No. 12 in the country before losing its last three - to Texas, Texas A&M and, in the Bluebonnet Bowl, West Virginia. It's the only time the teams have played.)
True, TCU has prospered in the last decade. Again, though, look at the trend. Between 1960 and the breakup of the SWC in 1995, TCU shared one league title. Then it was on to the WAC and two crowns in five years. Four years in Conference USA produced one shared league championship. And now six years in the Mountain West have resulted in three titles, including the last two.
Part of the uptick in performance is no doubt due to the program's improvement, for three years under Dennis Franchione and since 2001 under Gary Patterson. But to ignore that TCU did not become a football brand until it left the big-boy table with the breakup of the SWC is a bit naïve.
Now, all of that background is not an attempt to denigrate TCU football or its addition to the Big East. It is merely a matter of context. Let's not get carried away here and pretend that this is anything more than a first step. It will be a quality first step if TCU manages to continue its decade of success. It would help if Patterson stuck around for a while, or if the school is able to carry on after his eventual departure. Stronger programs than TCU's have failed in that.
With all of that in mind, however, here's the best reason for adding TCU to the Big East football mix (and no, it's not that the school brings its recent record to the BCS's current four-year evaluation of conference performances, including the Big East, although that's a pretty nice perk):
Perception.
Let's face it, the Big East has a bad rep right now, and deservedly so. On Sunday night, at least two top-10 teams are going to be left out of BCS bowl games while the very real possibility exists that an unranked Connecticut team that lost to 7-5 Michigan, 8-4 Temple, 4-7 Rutgers and 6-6 Louisville will get an automatic bid. (True, the league could save some face by sending a 9-3 Top 25 West Virginia team, but not much).
MORGANTOWN - There are plenty of good reasons for adding TCU to the membership of the Big East Conference, not the least of which is to begin the process of propping up a football collective that has seemed to go out of its way to shoot itself in the foot all season long.
Is it a bit of a gamble? Well, sure. We're not talking about adding an entrenched football commodity here.
Yes, since 2000 the Horned Frogs have won 10 or more games eight times. There is still a chance that by the end of the week they could find themselves in the BCS title game. No current Big East team comes close to matching that 11-year resume. West Virginia and Cincinnati come closest, each with three seasons of 10-plus wins and one last-week shot at a national championship game - WVU in 2007 and UC last season.
Shoot, the eight current Big East football members combined have only 11 double-figure-win seasons since 2000 (WVU, Cincinnati and Louisville have three, Pitt and Syracuse one each).
But this is not exactly like adding Nebraska to the Big Ten, is it? Between 1960 and 1999, TCU shared one conference title and spent a total of five weeks over two seasons in the Associated Press Top 25.
(By the way, one of those two ranked teams, in 1984, you may remember. Jim Wacker's bunch started 8-1 to get to as high as No. 12 in the country before losing its last three - to Texas, Texas A&M and, in the Bluebonnet Bowl, West Virginia. It's the only time the teams have played.)
True, TCU has prospered in the last decade. Again, though, look at the trend. Between 1960 and the breakup of the SWC in 1995, TCU shared one league title. Then it was on to the WAC and two crowns in five years. Four years in Conference USA produced one shared league championship. And now six years in the Mountain West have resulted in three titles, including the last two.
Part of the uptick in performance is no doubt due to the program's improvement, for three years under Dennis Franchione and since 2001 under Gary Patterson. But to ignore that TCU did not become a football brand until it left the big-boy table with the breakup of the SWC is a bit naïve.
Now, all of that background is not an attempt to denigrate TCU football or its addition to the Big East. It is merely a matter of context. Let's not get carried away here and pretend that this is anything more than a first step. It will be a quality first step if TCU manages to continue its decade of success. It would help if Patterson stuck around for a while, or if the school is able to carry on after his eventual departure. Stronger programs than TCU's have failed in that.
With all of that in mind, however, here's the best reason for adding TCU to the Big East football mix (and no, it's not that the school brings its recent record to the BCS's current four-year evaluation of conference performances, including the Big East, although that's a pretty nice perk):
Perception.
Let's face it, the Big East has a bad rep right now, and deservedly so. On Sunday night, at least two top-10 teams are going to be left out of BCS bowl games while the very real possibility exists that an unranked Connecticut team that lost to 7-5 Michigan, 8-4 Temple, 4-7 Rutgers and 6-6 Louisville will get an automatic bid. (True, the league could save some face by sending a 9-3 Top 25 West Virginia team, but not much).
Is the Big East as bad as all that? Well, yes and no. This year has been an absolute disaster. There is no way to quantify it as anything else. Not a single team has stood up with a single win that screams - or even whispers - "We deserve respect.'' This league's signature performance of 2010 was arguably West Virginia's 20-14 loss at LSU. Go ahead, name another. The Big East was 0-5 against Top 25 teams from out of conference. It was just 3-11 against teams from BCS leagues. WVU beat 8-4 Maryland, UConn beat 2-10 Vanderbilt and South Florida just beat 7-5 Miami.
It's that last one that really stands out from a perception standpoint, however - as in how perceptions aren't always reality. Miami fired Randy Shannon after he lost to USF. The story in the Miami Herald - and others elsewhere - said he was axed after "a shocking loss'' to the Bulls.
Shocking? Really? Because Miami and all its tradition and the ACC lost to South Florida and its lack of tradition and the Big East?
The ACC will send to the BCS either a Virginia Tech team that lost to Boise State and James Madison and then cruised through the ACC, or a Florida State team that was crushed by Oklahoma and lost back-to-back games to N.C. State and North Carolina. Yes, there will be some of the same howling about that as with the Big East's unseemly representative, but the cry over the Big East will overshadow it to be sure.
Lost in all of that will be recent history, of course. The ACC is 2-10 in BCS bowl games. The Big East is 6-6. Yes, it can be argued that Miami and Virginia Tech carried some of that Big East strength of record over to the ACC, but since those teams (and later Boston College) left the Big East for the ACC the former is 3-3 in BCS bowl games and the latter 1-5.
The ACC gets a pass, though, because it has Miami and Virginia Tech and Florida State. Clemson and Maryland and Georgia Tech have done good things over the past few decades. If the ACC champion loses to an FCS school that finishes 6-5 (as did JMU) or by 30 at Oklahoma, hey, it's just a glitch.
The Big East doesn't get that pass even though Cincinnati was one second (Texas-Nebraska) away from playing for the title last year; West Virginia was a meltdown against Pitt away from it two years before that; Louisville, Rutgers and WVU combined to go 34-5 the year before that; and in the last four years the league's bowl records have been 5-0, 3-2, 4-2 and 4-2.
Why? Because of perception. It can be argued that West Virginia is the only team in the league that has enjoyed anything more than flash-in-the-pan success over the course of the last two decades. Pitt has nine national championships, but really hasn't done squat since Dan Marino and Hugh Green left town, and was awful for a long time. Syracuse was good for a while, but not Jim Brown and Ernie Davis good. No other program in the league has traditional respect, so anytime they rise up (like Cincinnati or Louisville or USF or even Rutgers and UConn) for a period, there is natural skepticism.
All of which brings us back to TCU. Right now the Horned Frogs are hot. They might be even hotter if they manage to sneak into the BCS title game and win it. It may or may not be sustainable success the school is enjoying, but for the Big East it provides a serious bump in perception.
And these days that's what it's all about.
Reach Dave Hickman at 304-348-1734 or dphickm...@aol.com.
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