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(UWIRE) STORRS, Conn. -- On the eve (more or less) of the men's Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden, it's important to remember that our beloved, 29-year-old monolith of a conference is an epic maze of insanity.
It has been since the ACC pretended they cared about football in 2004, taking Miami and Virginia Tech. Boston College, like a kid pestering his parents to go to McDonald's, also tagged along.
The addition of Louisville, Marquette, DePaul and Cincinnati expanded the league to an unwieldy 16 teams in basketball and soccer, a tiny eight football programs and a simply-ridiculous seven in field hockey. Get it together, field hockey. On the plus side, only five full league members play women's lacrosse. (Extra credit: raise your hand if you know which five. Then, put your hand down if you're on the women's lacrosse team.)
But seriously, this league can't last much longer. There are just too many non-football schools to keep the arrangement past a couple more years.
Not being one to complain without offering solutions, I now give you my plan to turn the Big East from mega-conference into the mega-crazy-awesome conference it deserves to be. I give you: The Super East (I'm not married to the name).
Step one of my grandiose, ridiculous, totally idealistic and unrealistic plan is to separate the eight football conference members from the other eight schools, putting each in its own separate conference. For our purposes, we'll call them the Jim Calhoun Conference and the Lou Holtz League.
These leagues would be associated with each other -- think Major League Baseball before interleague play -- but any "crossover" games would not count in the standings, and thus the conference would be almost considered two separate leagues. Why is that?
Because both leagues will have 12 teams in two divisions each.
Step two toward the Super East would be to attract four football-playing and four non-football playing schools to fill out each conference's ranks.
So which schools would be the lucky eight, in my ideal world? Let me freak your mind and tell you that Maryland, Boston College and Penn State would be my top three choices.
They're geographic fits, they have sports programs with long, storied histories (except Boston College) and they have lots of fans all over the Northeast.
Imagine Calhoun and Gary Williams facing off once or twice a year, or UConn's football team traveling to Happy Valley to take on Zombie Joe Paterno.
And sure, I hate the folks from Chestnut Hill, but it'd be great for UConn to have an actual rival. Plus, we'd finally have someone to replace Rutgers as the most obnoxious fans in the conference.
