Published: July 23, 2009 12:03 am      

Lack of big names hurting the Big East

Let us first admit that preseason football rankings have as much to do with the future as does knocking on wood or avoiding walking under a ladder does.

Consider last year when Georgia was generally considered the nation’s top team in preseason polls but could not break the Top 10 while Utah, which only cracked the preseason Top 25 in Phil Steele’s magazine, finished No. 2 to Florida.

West Virginia, generally considered a Top 10 team, finished at No. 23 and Clemson, also generally considered a Top 10 team, could not even land among those “also receiving votes” and wound up firing coach Tommy Bowden.

Even admitting this failure of those polls to have any intrinsic value to predicting the future, they do serve one purpose and that is to crystallize the general perception of the strength of a conference in any given season.

And this year the Big East is considered to be something less than a BCS-valued conference.

There are six BCS conferences – the Atlantic Coast, the Big East, the Big 10, the Big 12, the Pac 10 and the Southeastern.

A compilation of this year’s pre-season polls shows the Big East without even one Top 25 selection.

The Big 10 has three teams in the Top 25, the Pac 10 and the ACC four teams, the SEC and the Big 12 five teams while Notre Dame, an independent, is ranked, along with non-BCS conference teams Boise State, TCU and Utah.

This is not something that the Big East can just slough off, considering there is a move afoot to alter the BCS with Sen. Orin Hatch of Utah pushing to include the Mountain West Conference. A weak Big East gives Sen. Hatch ammunition in what could wind up eventually with college football considering cutting back on the BCS power the Big East now wields.

While the Big East did do a solid job of rebuilding itself from the ashes that were left after the ACC raided the conference and stole away Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College, each considered a valuable football commodity for a conference, things do seem to be changing.

And normally when a conference slides it can be attributed to a weakening of the conference’s coaches, for no matter how you want to measure it, coaches in college athletics are the prime asset possessed by any school.

Why is the Big East basketball conference respected far more than the football conference?

That can be answered quite well with seven words – Calhoun, Boeheim, Huggins, Pitino, Wright, Dixon and Thompson.

That is as solid a core of coaches as there is – and maybe ever has been – in an American conference.

The Big East football conference, on the other hand, has not been able to keep the momentum it built as it battled back from the raid.

If you go back a decade you will see that the Big East was far better at the top than it is now, although it has improved with its bottom teams. In 1999 at the bottom of the Big East were Pitt, coached by Walt Harris; Temple, coached by Bobby Wallace; and Rutgers, coached by Terry Shea.

At the top, however, you had Hall of Famer Don Nehlen at West Virginia, Frank Beamer at Virginia Tech, Butch Davis at Miami, Tom O’Brien at Boston College, and Paul Pasqualoni at Syracuse.

Compare that to today when probably the No. 1 coach in the conference is Brian Kelly, who has led the Bearcats to a 22-6 record in two years and won the league title last year. He is the only Big East coach with 150 or more career victories.

The other top coaches in the league are Jim Leavitt at South Florida, Greg Schiano at Rutgers, Randy Edsall at Connecticut, Dave Wannstedt at Pitt and Bill Stewart at West Virginia, but none have much national prominence.

Steve Kragthorpe at Louisville has been a failure in his two seasons and Doug Marrone has yet to coach a game at Syracuse, let alone be a head coach anywhere.

When the Big East lost Bobby Petrino from Louisville and Rich Rodriguez from WVU it may not have lost much in the way of coaching integrity, but it certainly lost star value and that equates into national respect.

If the Big East is to again regain its place as one of the nation’s top conferences, coaches such as Kelly, Stewart, Wannstedt, Schiano, Edsall and Leavitt are going to have to find a way to raise their national profile.



Bob Hertzel writes for the Times West Virginian in Fairmont, W.Va. CNHI News Service distributes his column.