I’ve been looking, on or off, for an explanation these last few weeks of why South Florida was invited to join the Big East rather than, say, Memphis. The answer? I’m struggling to find anything, which leads me to believe it’s a simple one: The move made sense.
South Florida isn’t great at any moneymaking sports, which is to say that their success in football and men’s and women’s basketball has been limited. They haven’t brought great fruit, and in the ultimate test of the wisdom of their addition, the Big East does not survive in its prior form. They’ve made some isolated noise in each of those three sports, just as they’ve made isolated noise in baseball, softball, and men’s and women’s soccer in recent years, but they haven’t bloomed the way, say, UCF has bloomed, with the claimed national championship in football and the enormous scare they put into the Zion Williamson Duke team.
However.
That wasn’t clear in the mid-2000’s when the decision was made to invite USF into the league.
From what I can find in thinkpieces from a few years later—often what went wrong posts as the Big East fell apart—early reactions to South Florida joining the league were largely positive. They’d made their football noise in that bonkers 2007 season, upsetting Auburn on the road and West Virginia at home en route to a rise to being ranked second in the BCS rankings. They were almost always bowl-eligible. They were frequently alongside Louisville in the standings. And as a fast-growing school (both in terms of enrollment and academic ranking) located in fertile recruiting ground, there wasn’t a lot else the Big East could ask for from one of its Conference USA additions.
The problem wasn’t even really men’s basketball, the primary sport for what eventually turned out to be a quorum of the league. The Bulls won just ten games in their first four Big East seasons, but they made the NIT in 2010 before making the NCAA Tournament (and winning two games coming out of Dayton) in 2012. They’d reached a point where they were capable of being competitive, or at least seemed to have reached that point.
There wasn’t really a problem with USF.
When you look at it now, the Big East’s additions of Cincinnati and Louisville make sense as full-sport members. Cincinnati has been consistently nationally relevant in men’s basketball and has had a few high highs in football, one of which the program’s enjoying right now; Louisville was a good enough catch to jump ship for the ACC a short while after inclusion. The additions of Marquette and DePaul make sense as basketball members, fitting in as Catholic schools with some strong basketball history. South Florida does not make sense. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t make sense at the time. At the time, USF was a bit of a lottery ticket, and certainly unproven historically, but they were also a lottery ticket that didn’t pay off too poorly before things really went south for the league (something that coincided with USF struggling to bloom but was not a result of that struggle).
Right now, South Florida isn’t doing a whole lot for the Zombie Big East (more commonly known as the American Athletic Conference) in the majorly televised sports. But that doesn’t mean they won’t. And when we play the hindsight game with the Big East Conference, it doesn’t mean the Bulls were a bad addition at the time.
