The Big East has always been viewed as the weakest of the six BCS football conferences. In the past people have argued that the Mountain West Conference should take the Big East automatic BCS bowl bid and that Big East schools should have to earn an at-large bid like the other smaller schools. As a Cincinnati Bearcat fan, I wish I could write about a bright future for the conference and how good things are coming on the horizon. Unfortunately it looks as though there may be some defections from the conference in the near future.

The Big Ten is ambitiously looking to expand their conference. For a long time the conference has targeted Notre Dame as a possible new entry into the Big Ten. The Irish though seem content to keep their independent status and avoid being affiliated with a certain conference. It now seems as though the Big Ten is tired of trying to convince Notre Dame to join as a conference member and will make an expansion move with or without the Irish. The conference is ready to add three to five teams which would bring the total amount of teams in the Big Ten from 11 to 14-16.

Just to clarify if these perspective schools did join the Big Ten conference, they would be full-fledged members and participate as part of the conference in all sports not just football.

This is where the Big East comes into play. It now seems very likely that if the Big Ten does expand it will expand with teams from the Big East. Right now Rutgers, Pittsburgh, and Syracuse seem to be the schools the Big Ten will be most likely to contact.

The very thought of losing two of the conferences better football programs in Pittsburgh and Rutgers is bad news for the Big East. It gets worse though, it was thought the Big Ten would take 12-18 months to decide whether or not to expand. Now the Big Ten has sped things up and an accelerated expansion timetable is now in motion.

High ranking Big Ten officials will meet Sunday afternoon in Washington D.C. to discuss the possible expansion. If the officials emerge from that meeting with a plan to expand then Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney would notify the commissioners of the affected conferences before contacting the individual schools that they are interested in having join the conference. The expansion has to be finalized before July 1st for the changes to take place next year since the fiscal year for universities end on the last day of June.

As I said earlier Notre Dame remains the first option for the Big Ten but it does seem that the conference will find other teams to expand with if the Irish don’t join.

I will be writing about this more as the meetings happen and more specifics come out about the possible Big Ten expansion. I am not aware what schools the Big East would target to replace the new Big Ten members. The Big East grabbed schools from conference USA after Boston College, Virginia Tech, and Miami [FL] left a couple years ago. Would the Big East be willing to go back to C-USA and take a couple schools such as Memphis, East Carolina, and Central Florida? Those schools all have established Division one football and basketball programs but do not have near the clout that schools such as Pittsburgh and Syracuse do.

This move would definitely shake things up and create a ripple effect of teams leaving and joining other conferences (after the defections from C-USA to the Big East the Atlantic 10 also took St. Louis and Charlotte). It will be interesting to see how this plays and I am hoping that the end result isn’t the demolition of the Big East conference.