Boston College left, and took all certainties with it. Now, the Big East is wobbling on a pile of guesses.

On Sunday, the Eagles accepted an invitation to join the Atlantic Coast Conference, promptly leaving the 11 remaining Big East members – five in football – to brace for the side effects.

First, anger. Just hours after BC’s belated defection, Big East officials riposted with a round of furious press statements. Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese: ‘We are extremely disappointed.’ Rutgers AD Bob Mulcahy: ‘I am personally distressed at the lack of integrity displayed by … the ACC and by the senior administration of Boston College.’ Pittsburgh AD Jeff Long: Boston College ‘turn[ed] its back on its fellow members of the Big East.’

Second, reality. When Miami and Virginia Tech announced their departures early this summer, the Big East presidents and athletic directors met intermittently for months to reorganize the conference. Until this weekend, hope for a bright future had re-emerged. Boston College’s sudden exodus negates, or at least sets back, months of work, particularly because BC had sworn its allegiance to the reformed Big East.

Third, trouble. The remaining Big East members are promising they can still make this work, but now, they need to replace another team. The Eagles, unlike the football powerhouse Hurricanes and Hokies, can be swapped with a school of equal athletic caliber. Yet the 25-year-old Big East lost one of its biggest media markets, one of its charter members and another big chunk of its identity.

Some, in fact, are wondering how the Big East can survive, and better yet, why any school like Syracuse – which reaffirmed its commitment to the conference yesterday in a press conference with Director of Athletics Jake Crouthamel and Chancellor Kenneth A. Shaw – would want to stay on board.

‘Tell Jake,’ the commissioner of one non-BCS conference said yesterday, ‘that if he wants to leave, we’ll take Syracuse.’

He was half-joking, but the point still rang with clarity. During the summer, four schools, including SU, flirted with the ACC. Three of them have now joined, completing the ACC’s expansion into a 12-team superconference. Syracuse, meanwhile, remains in a league that’s now three teams short of the minimum for a football conference. In a league questioning whether its deal with the BCS will be extended when the contract expires in 2005-06. In a league that’s trying, once again, to regroup.

‘We’re going to ride out the storm,’ Shaw said. ‘We’re going to bring in some talented schools, some schools that are going to provide us with some very healthy competition and rivalries. I think we’re going to be just fine, but it’s going to take a while to get there.’

The Big East is already looking at a host of possible replacement schools, and Shaw said that the league has established a Dec. 1 deadline for deciding which schools to include in the expansion. According to several published reports, the Big East hopes to soon add Cincinnati and Louisville for all sports, including football, as well as Marquette and DePaul, which don’t field football teams. This would give the conference 15 members – seven of which play football.

So in other words, the Big East would still need one more team, the de facto replacement for Boston College. Wherever that team comes from – likely Conference USA or the Mid-American Conference – another league, resigned to the domino effect, will be sent scrambling for a replacement.

Before anything else can happen, though, the Big East must determine its own fate. Longstanding rumors about SU’s interest in the Big Ten resurfaced this weekend, and Shaw, asked yesterday about such a possibility, wouldn’t rule it out.

‘There are always temptations,’ Shaw said. ‘But the reason why we committed three months ago to this process (of rebuilding the Big East) was my belief and Jake’s belief that we can pull out of this and develop a very strong, competitive football conference.’

Right now, it seems like a challenge. Football programs at Syracuse and West Virginia have faded into mediocrity. Pittsburgh, seemingly destined for a breakout season, lurks once again outside the Top 25. The two other football-playing members, Rutgers and Connecticut, are even less notable. Rutgers is a perennial pushover; Connecticut is still building a program that won’t officially join the league until next year.

‘Still, I have great confidence in Tranghese,’ said the non-BCS conference commissioner. ‘He truly is one of the best, most creative thinkers in our business, and he had a lot personally invested in this.

‘But you know, people are acting like conference realignment is something new. Yet the reality is, schools have always been moving around for all sorts of reasons. I’m still old enough to remember when Arizona and Arizona State were in the WAC. When a bunch of schools now in the SEC were in the Southern Conference. Then there was the Southwest Conference, one of the all-time great conferences, and now that’s gone, too. Conferences come and go, and it will be interesting to watch what happens here.’

Published on October 13, 2003 at 12:00 pm