Is the Big East getting ready to

eulesseagle · June 13, 2006

Interesting article.....The B.E. have 8 FB playing schools and looking around to expand.

Eric Crawford is the main beat writer for the University of Louisville.

Eric Crawford 2006-06-07T10:22:00-04:00 2006-06-08T01:33:03Z 2006-06-07T15:13:54Z

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16082095.post-114969323474888265

Big East Q&A

Name: Rob Question: With all the talk about adding Central Florida or Navy as football members and the Big East bowl situation, how come the C-J isn't looking into these things? It's an interesting question. A couple of things. First, just because no story appears doesn't mean things aren't being "looked into." But let's look first at "all the talk." A Sporting News columnist suggested adding Central Florida. A West Virginia columnist recently suggested that Georgetown or Villanova might ramp up to Division I-A. And there's been some talk-radio discussion and message board speculation. None of that, however, constitutes news. And here's why: There is no actual expansion talk among Big East members. Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese says flatly that there has been no talk about it. The focus of Big East football at the moment seems to be stabilizing and strengthening the existing group of teams, not adding new ones. It would take a national player to break into the football conference at this point, and Notre Dame and Penn State don't appear to be looking for new affiliations. Journalistic questions From a journalism standpoint, however, it raises an interesting question. At what point does Internet buzz, even from national sources, rise to the level of needing to be addressed by media outlets? I found out very early on this beat that if I jumped to run stories to straighten the record on these kinds of stories, we'd be burning a lot of space just to follow up on other people's reporting or speculation. Perhaps, someday, that will become a role of the media. For now, I still have to follow up on rumors and reporting from the Internet -- I'd be crazy not to. But that doesn't mean it always will result in a story. A recent example. During the Big East Conference Tournament, a national online sports columnist said a source had told him that Indiana University had been told that U of L coach Rick Pitino would be interested in talking with the school if contacted. The guy's source was wrong. When asked about it, Pitino laughed. No one had asked him about it before reporting it. Officials at IU said they didn't know where the information came from. It was just wrong. Pitino had no interest. The question then became, do we run a story to counter someone else's reporting, or just run nothing, since there really was nothing to report. I think we wound up referring to it in print in a notebook, when the coach made a funny comment about it. I guess the point is that I can't get too much into the business of speculation. The tough thing is that speculation is half of sports journalism today. Still, in the newspaper setting, that's more the realm of columnists than reporters. I can get into it when the speculation starts to come from official quarters, coaches, athletic directors, etc. But just because a pundit somewhere says something, it doesn't necessarily make it news. Bowl talk Finally this. The Big East bowl lineup is what it is. The Big East has six bowl tie-ins and only eight football members (with Notre Dame also lumped into its bowl mix). League members I've talked to haven't expressed any concern or displeasure, and that includes U of L athletic direct Tom Jurich. Interestinly, some at U of L suggested that it might be a good idea to get a passport if you don't have one. If the Cards don't make a BCS Bowl, they could very well be headed to Toronto for the International Bowl to face a Mid-American Conference opponent, depending on what happens with Notre Dame. You need a passport to get into Canada now, and that process takes 6-8 weeks. If, as happened last year, someone else gets the BCS berth and Notre Dame gets a BCS bid, U of L would be headed to the Vitalis Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas. The financially strapped Houston Bowl is a question mark, as you can see from this story yesterday by the Houston Chronicle. At the same time, even with the loss of this bowl, the Big East would still have as many bowl tie-ins in the coming season as it did last season. The problem, of course, is that some of the bowls aren't so attractive. But that's what re-establishing yourself as a football conference is all about.

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