2012 Big East Football Previews, From Syracuse To Cincinnati

In watching West Virginia secede to the Big 12 in 2011 (with two other stalwart programs, Pitt and Syracuse, to soon leave for the ACC), the Big East saw most of its perceived football credibility walk out the door. But with a four-team playoff seemingly on the horizon, it is certainly worth noting that, had a playoff been in place in recent history, the Big East as it will soon be constituted would have had a role to play in several playoff postseasons.

For every season or two that the Big East is completely lacking of a national title contender -- and to be sure, 2012 is shaping up as one of those seasons -- there is a year where an up-and-comer catches fire. Despite being quite easily the worst of the six BCS conferences at the moment, the Big East’s members can rise to prominence when all the pieces come together. As it pertains to Cincinnati, then, the question is simple: can the Bearcats make it back?

It goes without saying that sometimes Twitter can dumb a conversation down to an intolerably stupid level. But sometimes it can sum an issue in wonderfully clean, elegant fashion.

Case in point: two tweets from Saturday morning.

But … did they really regress? In 2010, USF ranked 40th in F/+ and went 3-2 in games decided by more than one possession. In 2011, they ranked 40th again and went 4-2 in such games. The difference: they went 5-3 in one-possession games in 2010 and went 1-5 in 2011. All the components were in place for USF to field yet another decent, reasonably successful team. But you still need bounces and breaks, and you still need to make the right plays at the right time.

So now Holtz enters Year Three with, in theory, a lot of promise. His Top 40 team returns eight starters on each side of the ball, along with almost its entire defensive two-deep, some interesting newcomers and a solid kicker to boot. (Get it? To boot?) But after years of earning a certain benefit of the doubt, they have to earn it back after a season that saw them play steady ball on paper but lose seven of their last eight games on the actual field of play. For those who indeed picked them to win their conference last fall, do you double down on the Bulls in 2012, or do you hedge?

In general, UConn’s hire of Paul Pasqualoni could have made sense. When everybody else is going young and offense-heavy (Dana Holgorsen at West Virginia, Todd Graham -- ouch -- at Pitt), there could be value in going old and defensive.

And lord knows Pasqualoni has been around the block, way around the block. He was a Connecticut high school coach in 1972 and the head coach of West Connecticut State in 1982, and he began a 14-year tenure as Syracuse’s head coach in 1991. He knows the northeast, and if he could figure out how to bring Donovan McNabb, Marvin Harrison, et cetera, to upstate New York, he could bring the next McNabb to Storrs, Conn., right? Plus, somehow, he’s only 62 (two years older than Nick Saban), even if he looks quite a bit older than that.