TCU to the Big East?!

I've said it time and again, but after today's news about TCU moving to the Big East, it's time to say it once again: they need to remove the C from BCS.  The only reason all this BS with schools shifting conference has all come about is because of the BS with the C in the middle.  If the greedy, money-grubbing presidents of the BCS schools would agree to a playoff and actually allow for a real national champion, you wouldn't have a Big 17, a Pac-12, or a Mountain West (which is a pretty good conference) that can't keep a member.

Of course, this all started six years ago with the ACC.  The ACC decided it wanted to become a football power (how well did that work out for ya, by the way?), so it tried to destroy the Big East in the process, poaching Miami (which nobody really cared about since they should've been in the ACC anyway), Virginia Tech and Boston College (which is nowhere near any other ACC school).  From there, everything snowballed and the Big East added five schools from Conference USA (Cincinnati, Louisville, DePaul, Marquette and South Florida) to maintain an 8-team football conference and create a 16-team monster in basketball.  After all the dust settled, everybody was happy for a few years until the Big Ten and Pac-10 got greedy.

The Big Ten, which has been sitting with 11 since adding Penn State in 1994, wanted to even itself out (a completely reasonable desire).  Notre Dame wasn't going to happen, so the Big Ten started looking around for takers.  Nebraska volunteered, leaving the Big 12 for the Big Ten (although Nebraska's AD looked like a complete tool at the press conference when he said the Big Ten offered "stability" that the Big 12 didn't, even though it was Nebraska making the Big 12 unstable).  Then Colorado left the Big 12 for the Pac-10.  Just so everybody can keep track: next year the Big Ten will have 12 teams and the Big 12 will have 10 teams.  Got it?  Fortunately Texas (the only school that seems to actually thinking about its student-athletes) stopped the madness by agreeing to stay in the Big 12 rather than create a Pac-16, which settled for only adding Utah to go to 12.

The reason for all this ridiculousness is, of course, the BCS.  Because only six conferences have auto-bids, and those six refuse to let the Mountain West become the seventh, all of the Mountain West schools are trying to get out and join a BCS league.  (I'm not really sure what BYU's master plan was, but that's a whole other story.)  Big East football sucks.  Everybody knows that.  So, what better way to improve Big East football and help out one of the Mountain West schools in the process?  Never mind the fact that there are now 17! teams in the conference, which now extends all the way to Dallas!  (They also asked Villanova to go from FCS to BCS football to get to 10.)  The move actually does make sense (to an extent) and shouldn't effect Big East basketball too badly, but seriously, when will it end?  The whole reason the Mountain West Conference even exists in the first place is because the WAC expanded to 16 and that was too many.  I don't think that will happen here, but this definitely isn't over.  It won't stop until they finally implement a playoff.

Of course, the Mountain West and the WAC are the victims here.  Three schools (Utah, BYU and TCU) are leaving the Mountain West and being replaced by WAC schools Boise State, Fresno State and Nevada.  The WAC is adding Denver and two Texas schools to get back to nine, but Hawaii is talking about leaving because that will increase their travel even more.  The Big 12 survived annihilation, but again, for how long?  You know they'll want to stop confusing people and go back to 12 at some point.  I figured TCU and Arkansas to the Big 12 would make sense, but it doesn't look like that's happening now.  Maybe it'll be Rice and Houston now, but the Big 12 won't be a misnomer for long.  Of course, the Big East is destined to become even more of a misnomer when UNLV and BYU join the league.