The Big East's expansion plans have solidified with a model for what the conference hopes its new 12-team football league will look like. A conference official said that the six new programs in the “12-team model that's on the table” were Boise State, Air Force, Navy, Houston, Southern Methodist and Central Florida. The addition of Boise State is a key for the league to retain its automatic qualifying bid in the Bowl Championship Series, which appears to be the motive for both Boise State and the Big East to overcome the awkward geography. “If this can get done, that's a pretty good outcome for us,” a league official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official stressed that there was no planned order or definitive timetable for universities to be invited into the conference. He did say that no invitations were expected to be extended Monday, when the Big East will have a conference call in which its members are expected to vote on increasing the league's exit fee to $10 million from $5 million. Conference members hope that the solidarity displayed from the increase in the exit fee, which the league official referred to as a “trigger” for expansion, will help make the Big East an attractive landing spot as the realignment of the nation's leading conferences continues. The Big East's football plans picked up steam on the same day that the Mountain West and Conference USA announced they were forming a 22-team super league that will stretch from Hawaii to Huntington, W.Va. That merger is expected to have little or no impact on the Big East's plans, although Boise State and Air Force are now in the Mountain West. Under the Big East plans now being considered, Boise State, Air Force and Navy would enter the conference as football-only members. Houston, SMU and Central Florida would be added in all sports. Although the potential addition of those programs would dilute the league's strength in basketball, it would add the television markets and recruiting bases in Houston, Dallas and Orlando, Fla. Big East officials met with Central Florida officials in Cincinnati on Friday, helping to solidify the seeming inevitability of the Knights' entry into the conference. But the biggest change in the Big East's plans comes in its courtship of Boise State, which league officials had considered the longest of long shots last weekend. A key piece in Boise State's recruitment is assurances from the Western Athletic Conference that Boise's nonfootball sports could land there. The Big East would like Boise State to help in the eyes of the BCS, and Boise State is interested in playing in a league with an automatic qualifier in the BCS. Matadors run over Cubs The Matadors used a 35-point first quarter and a smothering defense that forced two first-quarter turnovers and held the Cubs to 16 yards total offense in a 77-0 rout at Lowrey Field and set up a big battle of District 2-3A unbeatens next week at Shallowater. By the time the game was 4 minutes old, most things had already gone wrong, and they only got worse from there. “We really talked about trying to get better and trying to do the things and play a complete game, and I'm proud of our guys,” Estacado coach Danny Servance said. “We try to emphasize every week that we have to go in and play with a different (defensive) intensity. I thought the kids played with the good intensity that we've been trying to get.” It's the second straight game the Matadors (5-2, 2-0 in 2-3A) have allowed fewer than 50 yards of offense by the opposition.
