People used to laugh at the Big Least for playing weeknight football games.
"I'm certain people said things," Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese said Tuesday in a telephone interview, "but no one said them to my face."
Tranghese admits the increase in weeknight games was borne of losing viewers to other leagues on Saturdays, but nobody is snickering now.
The weeknight games have turned to gold.
This will again become clear Thursday night, when a curious football nation tunes in to see second-ranked South Florida play at Rutgers at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN.
Game 5 of the American League Championship Series will run simultaneously on Fox, but the football game likely will attract millions of television viewers, just as several weeknight Big East games did last season.
The Mountain West Conference used to play on ESPN on Thursday nights but switched to CSTV last season. That opened more dates for the Big East and the ACC.
The Big East hit a couple of grand slams.
Last season's West Virginia-Louisville game drew 4.9 million households on a Thursday night. That was the second-most viewed regular-season game in ESPN history and drew about the same number of households as the Florida-Auburn game on a recent Saturday night on ESPN.
A week after the WVU-Louisville game, 4.6 million households tuned in on a Thursday night and saw upstart Rutgers stun Louisville.
That game, according to Big East associate commissioner Tom Odjakjian, had an equal rating in the New York metropolitan area to a Yankees-Tigers playoff game a month earlier.
Roll that one around your cranium.
This season, the WVU-South Florida game on a Friday night on ESPN2 attracted 2.6 million households. Even the Pitt-Navy game last Wednesday on ESPN drew 1.8 million.
That's a lot of eyeballs on your football program. Too bad Heinz Field had so many empty yellow seats.
"When you play on a Thursday night, you're the only game in town," Tranghese said. "Last year really, really helped us. Whatever perception continued to exist about our ability to play got wiped out."
Actually, lots of people still ripped the Big East, but who cares⢠The weeknight games have become the college version of "Monday Night Football" and serve as a precious recruiting tool.
That is why the Big East, the ACC, the SEC, Boise State, Hawaii and everyone else loves to play on ESPN on weeknights, despite some obvious drawbacks.
Nobody plays more such games than the Big East.
"It's tough on the fans, and sometimes, it's tough on the coaches and players to prepare on a short week," WVU coach Rich Rodriguez said. "But the exposure our league has gotten the last couple of years has helped raise our profile nationally and probably will continue to do so."
Tranghese vowed to beef up the weeknight schedule two years ago, when the league's marquee matchup -- a Saturday game between Louisville and WVU -- played in obscurity against the likes of Southern Cal-Notre Dame and Penn State-Michigan.
"When we got together after the season," Tranghese said, "I said to the people at ESPN, 'I'm willing to get away from some Saturdays if we can play in slots that are unopposed. I've got to get people to see our best games.' "
Touchdown, Tranghese.
