Every time I have listened to Mike Tranghese recently, the ominous phrase from the 23rd Psalm comes to mind: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death."
Tranghese led the Big East into the valley of big-time football in 1990 with no exit strategy if the plan didn't work. He never envisioned Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech leaving.
In Manhattan, Tranghese, on Tuesday, the embattled Big East commissioner, introduced his response to a summer of nasty conference raids that had the Big East lose its most powerful football colleges -- Miami and Virginia Tech -- to the Atlantic Coast Conference. Last month Boston College followed suit.
Tranghese's response: A newly configured Big East with five new members. Louisville, Cincinnati and South Florida will play in all sports. Marquette and DePaul will play in everything but football.
Nice try. The Big East, formed in 1979 as a basketball conference, will be a great basketball conference once again. Unfortunately, the engine that drives the intercollegiate bus is football. This football lineup is weak, and on its own, it will not be enough to keep the Big East in the Bowl Championship Series.
What's been more unsightly is the dog-eat-dog mentality -- from presidents on down -- that has brought us to this point. The ACC wounds the Big East; the Big East in turn raids Conference USA teams; and Conference USA raids the Western Athletic and Mid-American Conferences.
Everyone is weakened. Big East football, with the addition of Louisville, South Florida and Cincinnati, is not the Big East football of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College.
Conference USA, without Louisville, South Florida, Cincinnati, DePaul and Marquette, and with the addition of Rice, Southern Methodist, Tulsa, Marshall and Central Florida, is not as strong. The Mid-American Conference, without Marshall and Central Florida, is also not as strong. "In some ways, they're all coming down to us," Wright Waters, the Sun Belt Conference commissioner, said.
Judy Genshaft, the president of South Florida, doesn't like the word raid. "Realignment is a good word to use," she said by phone. "This is progress. As our university is growing in prestige and stature, you want to be with peers. This reflects who we are and what we aspire to be."
The new Big East members are gambling that in a few years they will not be cut off from the BCS Camelot and the money that flows from it.
Kenneth Shaw, the chancellor at Syracuse, pointed out that conferences were following academia's lead. "What goes on in higher education a lot is that we're continually raiding one another for faculty," he said. "We have a need for a certain kind of professor and his school wants to keep him. We make an offer, they make another offer, we make a counteroffer. We either get them or we don't."
Hiring a faculty member for an academic purpose is one thing. There's just something distasteful about luring away an entire athletic program -- for its earning potential. But that's where we are and you haven't seen the end. Meanwhile, every lesser conference is waiting for the rebound. Waters said: "It's not all bad. You'll see better games. The competition between conferences is going to be better because they're going to be even except for the split between the BCS and the non-BCS. But the rest of it will be healthy."
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