Well Lee, it just looks to be worse than you thought. The Big East is going to do the worst thing possible.

The Big East plans to invite four Conference USA teams to join the league in 2005, keeping the conference intact after defections of its two biggest football programs threatened to split it in two.

Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville and Marquette will be invited in November, a source close to the expansion plans told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Wednesday.

Yes, that’s right. The Big East will stay united as a Mega-Mess-Conference. Two divisions, eight teams in each, sixteen teams total. The divisions would be split into basketball/football and basketball only.

It will be one hell of an unwieldly basketball power conference. As an 8 team, football conference, though, it will absolutely blow (the lack of archived links is Blogger’s fault).

Lee is worried that Boston College will be poached by the ACC, well the ACC is apparently shooting a little higher.

The ACC is having discussions with Notre Dame about becoming the league’s 12th member, with concessions to allay the school’s concern about giving up its lucrative independent status in football in the near future.
…
Meanwhile, Notre Dame has had membership discussions with the 11-school Big Ten, too.

Sources close to Notre Dame say the Big Ten hasn’t pushed the football issue as hard as the ACC, though it also would ultimately want Notre Dame to become its 12th football member.

This is not good. While I don’t think Notre Dame is going to the ACC, it could be using it as leverage against the Big 11 to keep the majority of its NBC football money if it would join the Big 11.

Getting back to the Big East decision to remain united. Why? Why? Why? Why? I’ve tried to be somewhat optimistic. I’ve tried to believe that Pitt and the other Big East football schools would finally understand that it is untenable to be a split conference.

But no. They have apparently drunk the kool-aid and are willing to create an unwieldly, geographically stupid, bloated league stretching from Providence, Rhode Island to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am disgusted, demoralized, despondent and depressed. No sir, I don’t like it.

It now appears that the last grasping hope for saving my beloved school from eventual college football irrelevance is a complete shake-up/revolution in the BCS system.

Shit.