The Big East and SEC Join Challenge Week
Posted by nvr1983 on December 16th, 2010Given the growing popularity of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge over the past few years it seemed inevitable that the other power conferences would join the fray and earlier today the Big East and SEC announced that they would be expanding their relatively under-the-radar SEC/Big East Invitational into a more comprehensive Big East/SEC Challenge. Over the past four seasons the two conferences have engage in a series of 4 games to decide a winner. To date the conferences are tied 1-1-2 with the conferences splitting the overall games 8-8.
We could be seeing more huge SEC/Big East games in the future
While the SEC/Big East Invitational has yielded a few good match-ups over the past few seasons with the most recent being Tennessee‘s big win at Pittsburgh the fact that it only involves 4 match-ups between the conferences limits the ability of fans of either conference to confidently claim superiority based on these results although we have a sneaking suspicion that the Big East fans would have a stronger argument over the past few seasons. The new format would involve 12 games meaning that all the SEC teams would play every year and 12 of the 16 (then 17) Big East teams would participate each year. Because only the SEC teams would get to play every year the home-and-away rotation would be based on the SEC team. The games will be played over 4 days beginning on the Thursday after Thanksgiving. Keeping the Challenge to a confined period should keep fans interest and avoid some of the pitfalls that plagued the Big 12/Pac-10 Hardwood Series that is coming to an end. In a somewhat amusing move the name will alternate each year from the Big East/SEC Challenge in 2011 to the SEC/Big East Challenge in 2012 and so on. The match-ups have not been announced yet, but will be broadcast on one of ESPN’s family of networks starting on December 1, 2011.
