Off-Topic: College Football, the Big East and the Aztecs

Times Square welcomes the
San Diego State Aztecs to the Big East.

I figure that, after over a year of posting about the Niners, I'm entitled to at least one off-topic post. This is it...

Listening to the local sports talk yahoos this morning ripping on the fact that college bowl season starts this weekend with offerings like the New Mexico Bowl and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl got me fired up. If you don't want to watch the damned games, then don't. It's a free country, and everybody has a remote control for their TV.

But I know that I'll be doing everything I can to watch every snap of the New Orleans Bowl, even though I've probably never watched a single play from any of the previous incarnations of this game. Why? Because San Diego State is playing in this game, and this is about as good as it gets for the Aztecs' football program since I graduated from that school in 1992.

Am I happy about this? About settling for bowl games that occur over a week before Christmas? Hell no. And neither is SDSU. After decades of having every attempt at improving their programs thwarted by their neighbors to the north (in order to protect what USC and UCLA perceive to be their fertile recruiting grounds), the Aztecs have decided to join the Big East for football to finally grab a seat at the BCS table.

Will it work? I don't know. There's a good chance that conference alignments and their BCS automatic bids will have changed so much by 2013 that the Aztecs will never play a Big East game. Plus, the football-only move has required the rest of the sports to leave the Mountain West Conference and step down to the Big West Conference (yes, the Aztecs will be members of both the Big East and Big West conferences -go figure).

But now, the Aztecs finally have their foot in the door. And it's about time. Ever since USC prevented SDSU from joining the Pac 8 when it expanded to 10 teams back in the '70s, the Aztecs have been playing with the deck stacked against them.

As SDSU wallowed through the muck and mire of the WAC and Mountain West conferences, schools like USC and Texas grabbed blue-chip recruits like Reggie Bush and Ricky Williams (who both played high school ball less than a ten-minute drive from the SDSU campus), while SDSU had to search high and low to find whatever they could. SDSU had to go all the way out to Lousiana to recruit the greatest Aztec* of them all, Marshall Faulk, and even then, it was only the guarantee of letting him be a running back (as opposed to being converted to a defensive back) that brought #28 to Montezuma Mesa.

So for all of you pompous and arrogant jackasses chortling about how ridiculous it is for teams like SDSU and Boise State to now be playing football in the Big East, SCREW YOU. We've been kicked and beaten down long enough, and now we finally have an invitation to your party. And if I were you, I'd be a little bit scared. Despite never having a decent conference affiliation or big TV contract, we've managed to build a state-of-the-art on-campus arena and sporting complex that regularly hosts NCAA tournament games. Our men's hoops team, in a rebuilding year, is knocking on the door of the top 25 (with 9 straight wins against Pac 12 opponents) while playing in front of one of the best student sections in the nation.

And by the way, did I mention this all takes place in SAN DIEGO? If I'm an 18-year-old blue-chipper and I have my choice of, say, Norman (that's in Oklahoma, from what I've been told) or San Diego with the same prospects of playing for a BCS bid, I'm picking the city that has beaches and sunshine. And that's the dirty little secret that the Pac 12, Big 12, Big 10, SEC, etc. have tried to keep by knocking SDSU down every time they've picked themselves up from the mat after another major conference beatdown.

Now, SDSU will finally have some money and a major conference affiliation. The sleeping giant has awoken.

Aztec for Life.

*Okay, it's a toss-up between Marshall and Tony Gwynn.