I’m really glad that Navy won’t be joining the Big East for football until 2015.
It’s going to take me at least that long to obtain some lessons on how to verbally insult a U.S. military academy, filled with potential heroes who will be risking their lives some day, so that I remain free to cheer for the University of Connecticut.
What does one shout when the despised Navy gridiron team trots out on the field? “Go UConn, sink Navy.” Or, “Go back to the ship where you came from, you losers.”
It just doesn’t seem right. Besides feeling some patriotic affection for the sailor boys, there isn’t much in the way of “natural rivalry” here. Navy? In Maryland? Not much there to get my competitive hostility juiced up. Navy has been independent since 1879 — no conference to call home. That really does seem to make sense.
The big games of the year for Navy are against Army, Air Force, and Notre Dame — and I don’t imagine that’s going to change, just because of an affiliation with the hodgepodge of a conference called the Big East. Is Navy going to cancel the Army game, or the Notre Dame encounter, because it’s really hot to take on new conference foe Boise State? Unlikely.
Oddly enough, the best conference game for Navy, in a marketing sense, may be against another Big East newcomer, San Diego State. San Diego is home to many Navy folks, including a huge population of Navy retirees. They’ll come to the “home” game in San Diego and puzzle out who to cheer for.
In fact, knee-jerk loyalty to the home team may become more important than ever in the Big East, as even the pretext of “natural rivalry” disappears in “Big East” games involving Boise and San Diego State and Southern Methodist (maybe they should play Wesleyan) and Central Florida.
As the nation’s top college athletic conferences scramble to assemble collections of teams high-powered enough as to not bore ESPN to death, the “local” fans are increasingly irrelevant. In the aggregate, college football and basketball becomes just one large exhibition match. Do I care if Boise State beats Central Florida? Am I enraptured by a “conference” that makes little sense, except to a television programmer?
Some conferences have done better than others. The Big Ten, which became the Even Bigger Eleven, with the addition of Penn State, wasn’t unusually odd. With the exception of poor, brainy, private Northwestern University, the conference is made up of large state universities in the Midwest, so Penn State wasn’t a bad fit. Now, the conference has added Nebraska. Oh, well.
Based on something the Catholics slipped into the Vatican II documents, but never mentioned to anyone, the Big East is awash with Catholic schools that don’t play big-time football. Given sufficient confusion and turmoil, Marquette, Providence, Seton Hall, DePaul, Georgetown, Villanova and St. John’s could decide to break away and form the Transubstantiation Conference, leaving the basketball side of the Big East not-so-big.
At the very least, the scrambled conference comings and goings across the land cry out for some rebranding, in terms of names at least. When the Big East has to put on boots and a cowboy hat to go play Houston, and when the Big Ten isn’t 10, and the Big 12 isn’t 12, it’s time for some aggressive ad agency to make things right.
I’m going to lobby the Hartford Business Journal to send me to the Boise State game. Then I’ll be an official foreign correspondent.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.