Texas Christian Heads To The Big East
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After Boise State's surprising loss this weekend, it appears that Texas Christian University has paved its way to a BCS Bowl Game this season.
However, beginning in 2012, the Horned Frogs will no longer have to worry about being college football’s biggest bracket buster. Instead, TCU will have a chance at a guaranteed slot in one of the nation's high-powered games with their recent decision to move to the Big East Conference.
The move, announced Monday, opened new gates in the realm of college football reconstruction as the Horned Frogs chose to leave the Mountain West Conference in favor of the higher profile Big East.
“It was not the same league that we joined,” athletic director Chris Del Conte stated in response to the announcement. “It’s not the same home that we bought, it’s not the same home we were invited to, and things changed, the landscape changed.”
After an offseason of change, it appears conference realignment is once again rearing its ugly head.
Just in August, the Mountain West went under construction.
After losing Utah to the PAC-10 and BYU to a decision to go independent in football, commissioner Craig Thompson raided the Western Athletic Conference in an attempt to salvage his football-driven conference. Having already added Boise State, it further plundered the WAC by adding Nevada and Fresno State, and it appeared that the Mountain West would still have the potential to gain AQ status and someday become a BCS automatic qualifying conference.
Yet, with TCU’s departure, the Mountain West is beginning to look a lot like the WAC 2.0, and its chance of gaining AQ/BCS status again looks dim.
All this conference realignment has inevitably destroyed the non-automatic qualifying conferences’ chances at achieving BCS notability and opportunity. The Mountain West, the WAC and Conference USA continue to scrape by while conferences like the Pac-10 and the SEC remain college football powerhouses.
What is to come of the Mountain West is yet to be determined. What does seem certain is that the BCS and its insurmountable power has once again ruined the conference's chance of gaining an automatic bid or AQ status in the foreseeable future.
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