Playing For Big East Pride
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Many college football fans barely acknowledge South Florida. Even some Big East fans seem to forget about their existence. To others, they just seem like that "other team" that was added to the Big East along with Louisville and Cincinnati a few years ago. But the fact of the matter is that they are one of the main factors behind the quick resurgence of the conference that everyone gave up for dead after being ransacked by the ACC.
Yesterday night, one of the best quarterbacks that no one knows, Matt Grothe, decided to make his 21st birthday one to remember, with a 26-23 shocking overtime win at the #17 Auburn Tigers. If this had been the first ranked opponent the Bulls had beaten, maybe I would have been just as stunned as media outlets acted last night. The fact is though that South Florida has made a habit of beating ranked opponents in their three years of BCS conference competition. In the past two seasons, they have made their voices heard around the Big East with strong victories over ranked Louisville and West Virginia, and the win over Auburn gives them a third, and maybe most important one. The SEC is considered the best conference in college football by almost all circles, and I would agree with that sentiment. The Big East however, is considered the worst of the 6 BCS conferences, even after having three teams ranked in the Top 15 last year. For a non-ranked Big East team to come out on top, on the road, against a ranked SEC team makes a statement.
Whether the other five BCS conferences want to admit it or not, the Big East is back, and in better form than they were when they had the likes of Miami (51-13 losers yesterday), Virginia Tech (48-7 losers yesterday), and Boston College (the only defector to win Saturday) among their ranks. Louisville and West Viriginia are, and will be, annual preseason Top 10 picks. Rutgers has returned to prominence and will be a major contender in the years to come. South Florida has arrived, whether anyone else likes it or not, and the bottom half of the conference have all shown that they can be field quality football teams in the past 5 seasons.
Since the start of the 2005 season, the Big East has keyed in on the word "Respect". They felt like they lost a lot of it when three of their members left. They felt like they should have earned it back with a convincing win by West Virginia over Georgia in the 2006 Nokia Sugar Bowl, and if last season's 5-0 record in bowl games wasn't enough, South Florida's victory over Auburn should have put an exclamation point on the conferences comeback. As a lifelong Big East fan, they never had to go out and earn my respect, but for the rest of the country, I hope you've been paying attention.
