Here comes significant drop off number two. Big East fans apologies in advance but there’s no way to sugarcoat the current state of affairs in your conference. When Virginia Tech, Miami and BC jumped ship to the ACC the Big East back filled with "up and comer" Thursday night teams from Non-BCS conferences and has yet to recover. If you are wondering why there’s a picture of Lee Corso sporting the Williams College Purple Cow head in my Big East section I’ll give you two reasons. One I can’t find a picture of the guy wearing a Coonskin Cap, Panther Head, Bull Head or anything the hell else from the Big East because even those jack asses at the world wide leader won't bet a weekend’s worth of ratings by doing Gameday from a Big East locale. Reason number two is that the Purple Cows would probably finish 3rd or 4th in the Big East at the rate things are going. Since I'm piling on I'll also throw out there that it really seems like half the teams in the Big East just started playing college football 5 minutes ago and as a group they have some of the gaudiest uniforms in the country. Every time I watch a Big East game I feel like I’m watching a USFL game on ESPN Classic. The Big East by far has the least talent of all the BCS Conferences with an overall average of 53.98. Due to the Big East the Mountain West has a legitimate bitch about the BCS. Boy that hurts. Anyway………
The Rest
I know this makes me sound like a jerk going straight to "The Rest" but in all seriousness there isn’t a SINGLE TEAM in the Big East with a 5 year average ranking under 30. So I’m skipping Elite Talent, Great Talent and Good Talent. Call it tough love but the following is ludicrously unspectacular.
Pittsburgh at 30.4- The Stash has actually stockpiled the most talented roster in the conference. That said he still hasn’t won the conference title and couldn’t score against Oregon State in the worst Sun Bowl ever. Coaching is suspect but the jury is still out on balloonhead Mark May’s boys.
West Virginia at 36.2- Pretty decent talent in a higly effective spread system. Losing Pat White is a huge blow as the QB makes the Rodriguez variant of the spread go. Hard to evaluate the Bill Stewart coaching regime for at least another year but he did sign a pretty good class in 2009.
Rutgers at 47.4- Greg Schiano just signed a decent recruiting class for the Scarlet Knights but overall these guys are suspect as all hell.
South Florida at 49.8- Recruited pretty well this year but oversigned with 30 kids so it’s a bit inflated. Also suspect.
Louisville at 50- These former Thursday Night darlings are in a serious nose dive under Steve Kragthorpe both in recruiting and on the field. Ron English just broke camp as the DC and things are not looking good overall.
Syracuse at 63.2- Nowhere to go but up for the Orange who just signed the 116th ranked class in the nation. Brutal. There’s a new coaching staff on line with nowhere to go but up.
Connecticut at 73.2- Randy Edsall gets decent production out of these kids but the talent is lacking.
Cincinnati at 81.6- Yes that’s right, the defending conference champs have the least talent on paper of any team in the conference. They also wear ridiculous pants. I suppose you could say that Brian Kelly does more with less, but then again he’s not exactly facing the stiffest opposition.