The Syracuse Orange and Pittsburgh Panthers may go down as the villains in the Fall of the Big East. If that's the price, so be it.

I can't speak for Pitt but as far as I can tell, no one from SU has ever spoken ill of the Big East or talked about what happened behind closed doors. For us, it was a business decision, nothing more.

Meanwhile, West Virginia Mountaineers' AD Oliver Luck has taken any opportunity you give him to talk openly about the demise of the Big East and how he needed to get his school out of there ASAP.

He spoke to ESPN this week and this time revealed what we always suspected...that the conference got caught with its pants down when realignment came calling.

"I think it was pretty obvious that the league was going to struggle. We hadn’t added a new member since 2005. Sitting in these AD meetings, there was no expansion committee to speak of," Luck said. "You’re down to five members with no clear-cut expansion candidates, with no activity, so at that point I think people -- and not just me -- realized that we needed to look around and make sure first and foremost that we were going to be in a conference that maintained high standards and high-quality opponents."

"It’s much easier to stay in than get knocked out and try to get back in," Luck said. "That was always the fear. I’m not trying to say the Big East is on the outside looking in, but clearly, with the loss of so many good teams in the last 10 years between VT, Miami, BC, Pitt, TCU, there’s a lot of top-20 football teams that had left and are playing in other conferences."

Hey, Ollie, you forgot...uh, you know...oh, forget it.