Welcome to our newest creation - Big East Coast Bias. Over the next few weeks we hope to stretch out our blog-legs, kick the tires around here, and take advantage all that SBNation has to offer in creating the central source for news on Big East football and basketball on the web.
What Is Big East Coast Bias?
The goal of Big East Coast Bias (BECB) is to be the central source for news and analysis on all eight (soon to be nine) Big East football programs and all 16 (soon to be 17) Big East basketball programs. SBNation features some of the best individual team coverage of Big East sports. BECB aims to supplement that coverage providing a birds eye view of the action, while also providing plenty of individual team and game coverage itself. The Big East is both large enough and diverse enough that the various goings on can sometimes be too much to keep up with. BECB will corral all of the news for you in one convenient location.
Why Now?
Since the league was raided and reconstituted itself in 2005, there's never been a better time to be paying attention to the Big East. Big East men's basketball placed a record 11 teams in the NCAA tournament in 2011 while Big East member Connecticut won the National Championship. The Big East is the final BCS conference looking to expand. The 2011-2012 season figures to see as many as three Big East the teams in the preseason top 10. No conference can match the collection of Hall of Fame coaches roaming Big East sidelines on any given night.
Big East football, meanwhile, is poised (hopefully) to rebound from what can only be described as an abysmal 2010 season where its champion finished 7-5 and no team finished ranked in the top 25. Of the eight teams in the Big East in 2011, six have made coaching changes in the past two seasons. Another, West Virginia, will make a coaching change in 2012. The coaching change has surely hurt the product on the field, but after some struggles, the conference finds itself with some of the best defensive minds in coaching (Charlie Strong, Gary Patterson, Greg Schiano) matching wits with some of the more interesting and innovative offensive minds (Dana Holgorsen, Butch Jones, Todd Graham). While the product has been awful at times, it at least promises to no longer be boring.
Off the field, there's the red hot topic of expansion and the new television/media rights deal to be negotiated. The Big East desperately desires to have a tenth football playing member. Villanova moving up from FBS football to fill that tenth position no longer appears to be the shoe in that it did six months, or even one month, ago. Will the Big East wait and allow Villanova to come up with a more feasible plan to move up? Will the league add yet another team? If it does, will it be UCF, Houston, Memphis, or even ex-member Temple? Having added a tenth football playing member, the Big East will look to cash in on its uniquely valuable basketball product and negotiate a much more lucrative television for 2013 and beyond.
For these reasons and more, the Big East is worth paying attention to and busy enough to devote an entire blog to it.
Who Are We?
Pat and I are as college sports obsessed as as two people could be. Pat has developed his own rather complicated methods of statistical analysis of offensive players that you will become familiar with rather quickly as you read BECB. Pat has been a consistent contributor to several sports news outlets on a variety of topics from MLS to the NFL. I've maintained a Louisville focused blog of my own but will devote my time and efforts solely to BECB going forward. Pat and I are current members of the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) and will bring the professionalism and quality that such membership requires to everything you see on BECB.
We hope you enjoy the site and visit often.