John Marinatto's Grand Solution Was Navy And Syracuse Fans Feel Better About Themselves

Syracuse Orange fans have felt conflicted the last couple days.

A lot of pundits and talking heads want to paint the Orange as a bunch of soulless, greedy mercenaries without a care for those we hurt in our wake. That's simply not true. At least not for most of us.

Believe me, we feel bad about all of this. Who wanted the Big East to work more than us? A founding member(!), as Dana O'Neil must remind you every nine seconds.

The truth is, we just didn't think John Marinatto had a plan. We didn't trust that, at the end of the day, he could make the right decision and steer the conference in the direction it needed to go in order to survive. We assumed the worst, that he would hitch his wagon to some desperate quick-fix solution that solved nothing long-term and only serve to drive home the perception that the Big East is living in the past and unable to truly move towards the future.

In unrelated news, John Marinatto almost invited Navy to the Big East as a football-only member.

Before the sudden news broke last weekend that Pittsburgh and Syracuse were leaving for the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big East was in the final stages of acquiring Navy as a football-only member.

No official invitation was extended by the league, but both parties had extensive discussions about Navy joining the league in football only and it very well could have happened in the next couple of weeks, college football industry sources told CBSSports.com.

Whatever lingering doubts Syracuse fans had about whether or not we shouldn't have left the conference are now gone. Thank you, John. You are who we thought you were.

See Also: Adding Navy (and Army) is the Staples Easy Button Solution of Big East Expansion.