LOS ANGELES—Did Kirk Herbstreit misspeak? If you watch a replay of the 2011 Rose Bowl—which until this past Dec. 31 might have been the biggest victory in TCU history—ESPN’s college football analyst mentions the positive momentum the Horned Frogs could carry from beating Wisconsin into their new conference, the Big East.
Check the record books and you won’t find any evidence of TCU ever playing in the Big East. But Herbstreit was right.
For 10 months, the Frogs were ticketed to join that league—their fifth in a 16-year span, following the Mountain West, Conference USA, the Western Athletic and the Southwest. They were a geographic outlier latching onto a consortium from the Eastern Time Zone, a vagabond school wandering the country in search of a place to play big-time football. But before that forced marriage with the Big East was consummated, the golden ticket to join the Big 12 arrived.
