Big East to add five new teams

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
PHILADELPHIA -- A new experiment begins Tuesday in college sports.
Barring last-minute complications, the Big East will announce it is bringing in Louisville, Cincinnati and South Florida as football-playing full members, while Marquette and DePaul will join the conference for all other sports.
With that, the conference will try to use its brand name and history to perform a kind of sleight of hand to convince the football world that schools with little big-time heritage are, in fact, big time. The Big East also will need to convince its own fans that these new members will create meaningful rivalries worth paying for.
The arrival of the five schools, all from Conference USA, will create a supersized men's basketball league. Newcomers include one of last season's Final Four teams in Marquette, plus Louisville's Rick Pitino and Cincinnati's Bob Huggins. In DePaul, the conference gets the predominant basketball program in Chicago, the nation's third-largest city. They are joining a league that produced two of the last five national champions.
But that won't make Tuesday a great day in Big East history. After the defections of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College to the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big East administrators are braced for a significant decline in television revenue for football.
The league also knows its future in the lucrative Bowl Championship Series is no sure thing.