Now that the Big East has added Memphis, it appears the league has finished up its expansion plans.
TCU, Syracuse, Pitt and West Virginia are out.
Your new look Big East for 2015: Boise State, Cincinnati, UConn, Houston, Louisville, Memphis, Navy, Rutgers, San Diego State, SMU, USF, UCF.
How is that for change? I took some flak a few months ago for saying the Big East was going to end up looking like another version of Conference USA. Looks about that way to me. But, of course, commissioner John Marinatto has a different view.
"The one thing that we've learned, especially over the course of the past two and a half years, is that nothing stays the same," Marinatto said. "Obviously, we're in a very unique situation where we're making moves that in the past ... when we took Miami back in 1990. That was foreign to the then landscape of the Big East conference, out of the Northeast footprint we established.
"It's an ongoing evolution. Although it sounds odd today, five years from now it will be accepted and it won't be viewed in the same manner. So change is always going to occur. This is just another piece of evidence to support that."
No matter what type of spin the Big East tries to put on its latest configuration, none of these moves makes the football part of the conference look much better than it looked with its flagship schools as members. Could this have been avoided? That is a hypothetical that has no answer.
But the one consistent question I have received in my mailbag is to rate the job Marinatto has done with his conference under siege. I put the question to you today, and will have a future post next week with your responses and some of my thoughts.