Roll 'Bama Roll Nation:

The off-season is a long and arduous journey. It is a marathon, not a sprint.

As such, I have a football offering that is only tangentially related to the University of Alabama, and in a very ephemeral way, at that.

Specifically, I am going to take a cursory look at one of our fellow BCS automatic-qualifying conferences, the Big East, and specifically at the Big East of the future.

For the purposes of this post, since the primary focus of this article is the Bowl Championship Series and the Big East's status as an automatic-qualifying conference, I am only looking at football, and not at other sports. Also, I am looking to the future, and am not including teams that are currently in the Big East, but whose departure is imminent.

Here will be the Big East's lineup going forward:

1. The University of Cincinnatti - joined 2005.

2. The University of Connecticut - joined 1979.

3. The University of Louisville - joined 2005.

4. Rutgers University - joined 1991.

5. University of South Florida - joined 2005.

6. University of Central Florida - joins 2013.

7. University of Houston - joins 2013.

8. University of Memphis - joins 2013.

9. Southern Methodist University - joins 2013.

10. Temple University - re-joins 2012, (originally joined 1991).

11. Boise State University - joins 2013.

12. United States Naval Academy - joins 2015.

13. San Diego State University - joins 2013.

There will be two schools in this conference that joined prior to 2005. (Three if you count Temple, who got kicked out in 2004, and then apparently got begged to rejoin in 2012.)

Between these thirteen schools, this conference will claim 5 National Championships:

1. 1869: Rutgers (1-1) (Awarded retroactively by one major selector, with Princeton (1-1) winning a majority of major selectors, all retroactive.)

2. 1926: Navy (9-0-1) (Awarded retroactively by two major selectors, with Lafayette (9-0) winning one retroactive, Michigan (7-1), winning one retroactive, Stanford (10-0-1) winning four (one contemporaneous, three retroactive), and Alabama (9-0-1) winning a plurality of five, all retroactive.)

3. 1935: SMU (12-1) (Awarded by three major selectors (two contemporaneous, one retroactive), with LSU (9-2), Princeton (9-0), and TCU (12-1) winning one contemporaneous each, and Minnesota (8-0) winning seven (three contemporaneous, four retroactive).

4. 1981: SMU (10-1) (Awarded by a single major selector, the National Championship Foundation, which also selected Clemson (12-0), Nebraska (9-3), and Pittsburgh (11-1). Penn State (10-2) won a different major selector, with Clemson taking eighteen, including both the AP and UPI.)

5. 1982: SMU (11-0-1) (Awarded by a single major selector, with Nebraska (12-1) taking one retroactive, and Penn State (11-1) winning nineteen, including both the AP and UPI.)

Between these thirteen schools, the Big East will claim four Heisman trophies:

1. Andre Ware, Houston

2. Doak Walker, SMU

3. Joe Bellino, Navy

4. Roger Staubach, Navy

San Diego State will have the largest stadium (Qualcomm Stadium), with a capacity of 71,294, and SMU’s and Houston’s will be the smallest, at 32,000 each. Average home stadium capacity across the conference will be 48,568.

I tried to do some numbers with wins, bowl wins, etc, but it became very apparent very early that most of the statistics that I could readily find (I’m looking at you, wikipedia) were including 1-AA, Division II, and JUCO numbers, so didn’t pull very meaningful data. It does appear that Cincinnati (7-6), Connecticut (3-2), Rutgers (5-2), USF (4-2), and Boise State (8-4) all have legitimate winning records in bowl games.

When does the BCS contract get renegotiated, again?