Unpredictable Big East has been nothing but fun

By Darrell Laurant  |   Thursday, November 20, 2008  |  Comments( 2 )

College Football
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There is no other sport like college football in its potential for fan disappointment.

All team sports wend their way toward a single champion at the end of the season, but most of them allow a margin for error. A college basketball team can start off poorly, recover to win its conference championship and still make the playoff field of 64, where anything can happen.

College football, by contrast, is unforgiving. Lose one game, and you've probably blown your shot at a national title. Lose two, and you're a goner.

You can blame the BCS for this. It's OK -- everybody else does. This shadowy alliance of sports officials, sportwriters and computer geeks has the power to snatch two teams out of the mix and anoint them as the final contenders.

But what about conferences like the Big East this season, where parity seems to be the order of the day? Instead of savoring an intriguing "any given week" scenario, some who follow the league grumble because no team has stepped up to annihilate the rest of its competition and give the Big East a possible BCS champion.

So what? To me, at least, this has been an intriguing season, based largely on its unpredictability. For example: Connecticut hammered Cincinnati, Cincinnati beat Rutgers, Rutgers beat Connecticut.

A couple of weeks into the conference season, South Florida was considered perhaps the best team in the league and Rutgers the second worst. So how do you explain the Scarlet Knights' 49-16 victory over the Bulls last week?

Louisville beat South Florida and came very close to beating Cincinnati, but also lost to woeful Syracuse.

The league title was supposed to come down to the Dec. 6 meeting between West Virginia and South Florida. Instead, it could be this week's Cincinnati-Pitt game -- or, perhaps, the Pitt-West Virginia Backyard Brawl on Nov. 29. Right now, the Bearcats, Panthers and Mountaineers all have one league loss.

Moreover, the Big East can hold its own with most conferences this season in terms of exciting individual players -- Pat White and Noel Devine of West Virginia, LeSean McCoy and Scott McKillop of Pitt, Matt Grothe and George Selvie of South Florida, Mike Mickens of Cincinnati, Hunter Cantwell of Louisville, Donald Brown of Connecticut, Kenny Britt (and, recently at least) Mike Teel of Rutgers.

And despite its general lack of respect, the conference has had its interleague moments -- West Virginia running all over Auburn on an ESPN Thursday night, Pitt upsetting Notre Dame in overtime, South Florida outgunning then-highly ranked Kansas early in the season.

So the league isn't going to have a representative playing on Jan. 8 in Miami. It's still been fun.




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