Big East Schools Planning to Form Football Conference

Big East schools with Division I football programs will invite West Virginia, Temple, Rutgers, and Virginia Tech into a Big East football league, the Philadelphia Daily News reported today.

The newspaper said athletic directors from Syracuse, Pitt, Boston College and Miami will meet Wednesday in Washington, D.C., to vote in the new members.

Temple, Rutgers and West Virginia--currently independents in football--would remain in the Atlantic 10 for other sports, the newspaper said. Virginia Tech is in the Metro Conference.

“I can’t react to (the News report) because I think someone’s got a hunch, but it’s not a fact yet,” West Virginia Athletic Director Ed Pastilong said today.

“I hope before the week’s out we are presented a proposal as such. . . . They are meeting Wednesday and Thursday, I do know that, and they are meeting to discuss expansion,” he said.

“A conference like this should give our program more clout,” Temple Athletic Director Charles Theokas told the Daily News. “And it should do wonders for the rest of Eastern football.”

Temple’s football team finished 7-4 this season.

“If something like this should work, right now, as we’re speaking, we would have been boarding planes to a bowl game because we would have been second or third in Big East football rather than the second- or third-best independent in the East,” Theokas said.

Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese said he was drawing up papers to force the eight schools to make a 10-year commitment and prohibit them from forming an all-sports conference.