Big East thrives.......even on the gridiron

With Louisville and West Virginia scheduled to play the Big East's premier regular season foootball game in years this evening, the New York Times jumped in this morning to report on how the often-maligned football conference is doing just fine, thank you. And with good football teams comes Big East harmony -- a very good thing for a non-BCS institution like Marquette.

Mike Tranghese rightly plays the role as 'hero' in this article, which offers candid insight into the much criticized Big East expansion from 2003, and analyzies the marketing/promotion strategy of the league -- which by any measure is working like a charm. Consider:

Three years ago at the Big East office, the situation looked so bleak that Commissioner Michael Tranghese spent three weeks preparing a tactful way to dissolve the conference. The defections of Miami and Virginia Tech to the Atlantic Coast Conference in June 2003 had athletic directors plotting a breakup.

“That was probably the darkest time, only because this thing created in 1979 was going to split,” Tranghese said in an interview at his office Tuesday.

Now, it appears, the road to college football’s national championship will run through the Big East............ This season...the Big East has three teams in the B.C.S. top 12, as many as the powerful Southeastern Conference.

The full article is available to subscribers by clicking here. An online subscription to the New York Tmes is free (for this stuff) -- all you have to do is register.