It’s what they’ve always wanted.
At long last, Memphis is part of the Big East.
The Tigers officially accepted an invitation to be part of the conference’s next incarnation in 2013, the conference said Wednesday. Memphis is the seventh school, and fourth from Conference USA, to sign up for future membership in the Big East since December. The Tigers will compete in the Big East in all sports.
Memphis has been trying to upgrade its conference affiliation for years, and the Big East was always the most likely landing spot. The Tigers were snubbed during the Big East’s last massive expansion in 2005 and lost a longtime rivalry with Louisville in the process.
Now with the Big East rebuilding again and eventually in need replacements for West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Syracuse, there was finally room for Memphis.
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Memphis gives the Big East 11 football teams committed for the 2013 season, still one short of the 12 needed under NCAA rules to hold a conference championship game — though the league could ask the NCAA for a waiver to play a title game with less than 12 teams. Plus, there’s no guarantee some of the holdovers, such as Louisville, Rutgers and Connecticut, won’t jump at the chance to join another league if the opportunity comes up.
And it’s still unclear when West Virginia, Pitt and Syracuse will leave. Big East bylaws require a 27-month notification period for schools that want to leave and commissioner John Marinatto has said he intends to make the departing schools honor that. West Virginia has filed a lawsuit to begin competing in the Big 12 in the fall. The Big East has countersued and Pitt and Syracuse are watching the cases closely as it could determine when they start playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
It’s possible the Big East could have 14 football teams and 20 basketball teams in 2013.
Good luck planning the 2013 schedule. I kind of suspect that the current litigation will reach a settlement of some kind before then. Be that as it may, I don’t think this changes that much. The Big East is still an odd, geographically-disparate assortment of schools that is now stronger in basketball but not football.
As for the conference Memphis is leaving behind, the pending CUSA/MWC merger is still on.
Conference USA’s board of directors will meet later this week to discuss the possibility of a full-scale merger with the Mountain West Conference, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
The prospect of a merger was already on the meeting agenda, even before C-USA member Memphis was on the verge of joining the Big East, the source said.
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In the past year, C-USA members Houston, SMU and Central Florida accepted invitations to join the Big East in 2013-14.
That, along with Memphis’ pending departure, would leave C-USA with eight members: Southern Miss, Tulsa, Marshall, Rice, UAB, Tulane, East Carolina and UTEP.
The Mountain West is adding Nevada and Fresno State from the Western Athletic Conference for all sports and Hawaii in football. But the MWC is losing San Diego State to the Big East in football and the Big West for all other sports; Boise State to the Big East in football and the WAC in other sports; and TCU to the Big 12.
That means in 2013-14, the MWC would have eight football members, including Hawaii, and seven in all sports: UNLV, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado State, Air Force, Fresno State and Nevada.
A merger between C-USA and the MWC could consist of a conference with its current 2013-14 membership of 15 in all sports and 16 in football.
I want to point out that ten of those schools – Rice, Tulsa, UTEP, and all of the MWC schools except Nevada – were once part of the WAC16. Party like it’s 1996, y’all! In all seriousness, I don’t think that’s a terrible outcome. I just don’t think that any outcome right now should be seen as anything but a stopgap until the next round of changes comes along.
“part of the WAC16”
Yeah. And that was an unwieldy mess. Hawai’i had travel issues with all those teams east of New Mexico, and they had issues with coming west.
Yeah, I don’t envy Hawai’i its travel issues. At least the New WAC16 (probably not the official name) would still have a lot of western states for them. And for what it’s worth, I liked the old WAC16. They were good days for Rice football, and had the bowl scene been like it is now, the Owls would have shed that “not gone to a bowl since…” tag a decade earlier. I still think that conference could have been pretty good.
What frustrates Hawai’i fans right now is the fact that we finally got into the Mountain West just as BYU departed. Now, Hawai’i and its fans (and media) take its rivalry with BYU far more seriously than BYU and its followers do, but it’s a little dispiriting to think it could have been rekindled and now won’t be except when the Independent BYU has a hole in its schedule which needs to be filled.