Big East Expansion: Conference Determined To Recruit New Members

After its football schools met Tuesday evening in New York, the Big East issued a statement that essentially says that despite the impending departures of Pitt and Syracuse to the ACC, the Big East will go on.

Our membership met this evening and we are committed as a conference to recruit top level BCS caliber institutions with strong athletic and academic histories and traditions. We have been approached by a number of such institutions and will pursue all of our options to make the BIG EAST Conference stronger than it has ever been in both basketball and football.

Ralph D. Russo reports that the Big East teams who are left will try to recruit new members, and that the Big East believes there's no rush to do this, since Pitt and Syracuse are supposed to be committed to the conference until 2014.

The really important thing here, of course, is who the Big East ends up recruiting. If it's schools like Navy and Air Force, as one report recently suggested, then the Big East's already-poor reputation as a football conference can only get worse, and a serious football program like that of West Virginia might really get left out in the cold.

For more on the Big East, check out Big East Coast Bias.