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After a decade of turmoil during which it was consumed as much by internal tensions as by the outside forces that were tearing it apart, the Big East Conference is down to its last, best chance. Now that the league's seven non-football schools have decided to bolt and its clumsy East Coast/West Coast ploy has begun to unravel, will the Big East finally be able to coalesce around a common purpose for the future? The answer comes down to the makeup of the future membership roster. Success will be achievable if the conference reconstitutes itself in a geographically logical fashion with like-minded schools having football at the core of their athletic engines. Attractive television markets must be part of the equation. So far, the jury is still out on whether that is the course the league will pursue. During its most recent tumult, the Big East's unwieldy gestures at defining its new brand left plenty of room for doubt about whether it has arrived at a solid plan for, first, achieving real stability, and, second, positioning itself for prosperity. The so-called Catholic Seven were part and parcel with the all-sports schools in the convoluted western expansion strategy that envisioned the perpetuation of a discredited conference structure handicapped by divergent interests and wracked by intrigue and mutual suspicion. It should be apparent to those with open eyes that the awkward pursuit of football-only associations with a few Mountain West schools was little more than a desperate Hail Mary to try to sustain the unsustainable. It was a reflexive attempt to prop up the same philosophy that long kept the Big East frozen in a virtually defenseless posture as raiders ransacked it. Fortunately, all is not lost yet. Read more: http://bonesville.net/Articles/DannyWhitford/12-13/011413_Whitford.htm