The other day I had some not-so-nice things to say about the Big East.
That prompted another email from our punctuationally challenged friend Jason who I presume to be a Big East fan.
I guess he must have hit his punctuation limit for one email because he sent me another one right after the first one.
Oh snap! How to respond to that? First of all, I never claimed the Big Ten to be the best conference in the land. I defy anyone to find a link on BSD where I said that and I'll eat a healthy portion of crow if you can find one. I just think the Big East is overrated. That's all.
Jason puts up a bunch of useless facts like Big Ten bottom feeders losing to Big East bottom feeders and then accuses me of "spinning the facts". His statistic of Big Ten teams being 4-8 against ranked opponents is interesting. So I used Jason's logic against him. A little research of my own shows the Big East went 2-3 against ranked opponents outside of the conference. The wins came against the only other conference to rival Big East as the worst BCS conference, the ACC. Louisville claims both victories over Miami and Wake Forest. Miami sucked last year and Wake Forest only ended up in the BCS partly because Miami, Florida State, and Virginia Tech all sucked.
How about the mighty SEC? They're widely considered the kings of college football, right? How did they do against ranked competition? A rather mediocre 6-4.
So what can we conclude? Besides the fact the Big Ten has twice as many top 25 wins, nothing much. But we can see that though the Big Ten had a down year, they still played ranked opponents 12 times while the Big East only played ranked opponents five times. The Big Ten claimed wins over Notre Dame, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee despite losses to Notre Dame (3), Cal, USC, Florida, Texas, and Hawaii. Nobody can deny there is no shame in losing to any of these teams. They are a proverbial who's who of college football and most of them are starting the season ranked this year.
The point here is I will not give the Big East any respect until they play opponents on a higher level. Bash the Big Ten all you want, but at least they're out there playing people which is more than we can say about the Big East.
But maybe I should explain this in a language Jason would understand.