Ishaq Williams

The 6-foot-6, 220-pound DE/TE from Brooklyn Lincoln has verbally pledged to Notre Dame over Syracuse and Penn State, a Lincoln source told SNY’s Sal Miciotta.

“Ishaq is Irish,” his father, Shaun Williams, reportedly posted on Twitter.  “See you in South Bend.”

Williams, who led Lincoln to the city championship game for the first time in 17 years, was supposed to have taken an official to Penn State this weekend, but opted to forego the visit and commit to the Irish instead.

“He woke up this morning and decided he didn’t even want to make his official visit to Penn State this weekend,” Lincoln athletic director Renan Ebeid told Miciotta. “He wants to go to Notre Dame. He’s excited this whole process is over and looks forward to college.”

Rivals.com ranks Williams, who reportedly had over 30 scholarship offers at one juncture, as the No. 2 weakside defensive end in the Class of 2011.

He is Notre Dame’s 21st verbal commit for the Class of 2011.

(Photo courtesy Daily News)

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Pasqualoni will be introduced at a news conference on Friday (12:30, SNY).

“We are very proud to welcome Paul Pasqualoni to the UConn family and also bring him back home to his native Connecticut,” UConn athletic director Jeff Hathaway said in a statement.

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The Horned Frogs are joining a league with an automatic bid.

TCU will become the 17^th member of the Big East Conference, and ninth football program, July 1, 2012 and will join the league for all sports beginning in the 2012-13 season.

“We’re going to the Big East, let’s get fired up,” TCU athletic director Chris Del Conte said. “It’s a great time to be a Frog.”

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The Big East, by a vote of its Presidents and Chancellors, extended the invitation for membership.

TCU will become the 17th conference member — and ninth football program — on July 1, 2012.  Its athletic teams will begin competing in the Big East in the 2012-13 academic year.

With an enrollment of 9,142 in Fort Worth, Texas, TCU competes in 20 sports.  The university’s Chancellor is Dr. Victor J. Boschini, Jr. and the Athletics Director is Chris Del Conte.  The university was founded in 1873.

“Our membership is genuinely excited to add an institution of the caliber of TCU to our Conference,” said Big East Conference Commissioner John Marinatto. “Chancellor Boschini and athletic director Chris Del Conte clearly share the same academic and athletic aspirations of our current members and are similarly committed to sponsoring a very highly competitive athletic program.  Located in one of the top five media markets in the country, TCU also enables the Big East to extend its media footprint, which already encompasses more than a quarter of the country.”

“The addition of TCU ensures that the Big East will continue to remain one of the nation’s premier athletic conferences well into the future,” stated John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., President of Notre Dame and Chairman of the Big East CEO Executive Committee.  “With TCU, the Big East adds an excellent academic institution that combines outstanding athletic achievement with a commitment to NCAA compliance and educational success of its student-athletes.”

The Horned Frogs have enjoyed significant recent success in the athletic arena and in the classroom.  The TCU football squad finished the 2010 regular season with a 12-0 record.  The Horned Frogs are ranked third in the current Bowl Championship Series standings.  A year ago, the football team played in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.  The baseball team played in the 2010 College World Series.

Additionally, the women’s basketball team was the regular-season conference champion.  The men’s and women’s tennis teams were conference tournament champions.  The men’s swimming team captured a regular-season league crown.  The women’s volleyball team participated in the NCAA Championship.

Overall, the Horned Frogs produced nationally-ranked programs in football, baseball, men’s golf, women’s golf, rifle and equestrian.  Individually, 51 Horned Frog student-athletes earned all-America honors.

Academically, TCU student-athletes posted a departmental cumulative grade-point average of 2.98 in the 2010 spring semester, the highest since TCU began reporting scores in 1998.  Fifty-three percent of the student-athletes had GPAs over 3.0 for the spring semester.

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Texas Christian University will hold a 2 p.m. EST press conference Monday to announce that it will join the Big East Conference in all sports beginning in the 2012-13 season.

“I guess you gotta do what you gotta do with what’s out there,” former Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel said by phone. “And what’s out there with TCU in football is certainly very attractive.  It’s the other programs that I think just from a travel perspective, it’s going to be very expensive.”

“But having said that, TCU is showing its stuff as a football program. That adds a  lot of credibility to the Big East, which it certainly needs.”

The TCU football team is currently 12-0 and ranked third in the BCS standings.

TCU spokesman Mark Cohen was not immediately available for comment.

The addition of TCU will bring the Big East to nine football teams and 17 basketball teams. The league recently said it was in favor of getting to 10 football teams.

Several Big East football coaches, including UConn’s Randy Edsall, have come out publicly in favor of adding a ninth football team to balance out the schedule.

Currently, teams play a seven-game, unbalanced schedule. Some teams play four home games and three away, while others play three home and four on the road.

During the annual Big East Media Day in Newport, R.I. in August, commissioner John Marinatto told the league’s football coaches not to discuss potential expansion, but he did address the topic.

“If it’s to our advantage to do something like that, everything’s on the table,” he said.

“We decided that we want to look at and study everything. And we try and do things in a quiet way behind the scenes.”

Villanova, a Big East member for basketball and other sports, has also been offered a spot for football, which would bring the conference to 10 teams.

“Villanova has been obviously a member of the conference for 30 years,” Big East Commissioner John Marinatto told AOL FanHouse, which initially broke the TCU news. “We’ve encouraged them for a number of years going back to 1997 to do whatever they feel is in their best interest. I think they’re in the process of evaluating that question and if they evaluate it in the affirmative, we’ll obviously have a conversation about membership.”

Villanova is expected to let the conference know by the end of the current school year, Fanhouse reported.

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PHILADELPHIA (AP) – The Big East conference is set to expand its football roster.

Big East presidents unanimously agreed to expand the number of football-playing schools to 10 at Tuesday’s board of directors meeting in Philadelphia.

Commissioner John Marinatto said in a statement potential expansion candidates will start to be evaluated. He declined comment to The Associated Press, along with athletic directors and Big East adviser Paul Tagliabue, after the meeting.

The 16-member Big East, where all members play basketball, has eight teams playing football. There was no timetable announced for a decision.

One obvious candidate to join is Villanova.

The conference informed Villanova shortly before Labor Day that it wanted to add the Wildcats to the football roster. Villanova currently plays in the Colonial Athletic Association in FCS. Villanova won a national championship last year and is considering a move up to the Football Bowl Subdivision. If it does, that will fill one of the Big East’s spots.

“Our football evaluation is ongoing,” Villanova AD Vince Nicastro said. “We are moving forward as quickly as we can, but not at the expense of being absolutely thorough. We still don’t have a specific decision date, but it is likely to be resolved sometime during this academic year.”

Villanova, which made the Final Four in 2009, has been part of the Big East basketball conference since 1980.

The Wildcats have played at the second-tier level since 1985 and rejected an earlier offer to join the Big East in 1997. Connecticut accepted an invitation that season to start the process to move up to what was known as Division I-A.

Other potential expansion targets include TCU from the Mountain West Conference, and Central Florida, Houston from Conference USA. While Texas schools seem like an odd fit geographically, it would allow the Big East to tap into huge television markets, as well as fertile recruiting territory.

Temple, which was essentially kicked out of the Big East a few years ago and is now experiencing a renaissance in the Mid-American Conference, could also be a possibility, but Villanova would also deliver the Philadelphia market so there might not be a need for two schools from that area.

The move also raises the idea that expansion could lead to a split between basketball only and the football members. Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Rutgers, Louisville, West Virginia, USF, Connecticut, and Cincinnati all play football.

Non-football members such as Villanova also include St. John’s, Seton Hall, Marquette, DePaul, Providence and Notre Dame.

UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun said at Big East media day last month that a shakeup could come.

“Since football’s come, we’ve had less and less influence,” he said. “That’s good in many ways. I love football. But the league is set up to be very good for football and it’s become so much more difficult for basketball.

“For basketball, you’ve really created a nightmare for coaches. The 18 games continues to be a nightmare for me personally. Always will be.”

While Big East is as strong as any basketball conference in the country, the football generally lags behind conferences such as the Big Ten and SEC. Because of that, the Big East’s teams are targets for other leagues, which could offer more money and higher profiles.

When the Big Ten announced last December it was considering expansion, it made sense that the conference might target Big East schools as new members. Instead, the conference started its 20th football season with its membership intact.

That doesn’t mean the Big East is entirely in the clear when it comes to its teams being poached by other leagues, another reason why it needed to be proactive and expand.

“I don’t think anything’s settled at all,” Calhoun said. “I still think there will be change.”

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“I don’t want to lie to you,” Johnson said. “In the ideal world, the SEC would call and we’d go tomorrow.

“But in the meantime we’re going to do everything we can to make this thing [Conference USA] get stronger and stronger.”

While Johnson has long maintained that the SEC would be his first choice, Memphis is often linked to the Big East.

Yet the Big East has recently reached out to Texas Christian and Villanova about becoming the league’s ninth football team, thereby balancing the league schedule.

“From the football standpoint, it’s a little awkward on their scheduling because they have seven conference games and ideally you’d like to have a minimum of eight,” Johnson said last year. “So that’s one of the things that we would hope would be in our favor.”

Memphis has been a member of Conference USA since the mid-1990s.

Joining a BCS conference enables greater payouts from TV and bowl games, as well as enhanced recruiting opportunities.

“Money, money, money,” Johnson said when asked his main reasons for wanting to join the BCS.

Last year, Johnson hired former Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese as an adviser “just to evaluate our program.”

“I wanted him to come in and just evaluate our program,” said Johnson, who knew Tranghese from Johnson’s days at Temple. “It got misconstrued that he was coming in just to get us into the BCS, and that really wasn’t it. It was for him to evaluate.”

On the basketball front, Johnson has noticed that former Memphis coach John Calipari has made news by recruiting players to Kentucky like Eric Bledsoe and Enes Kanter, both of whom have been investigated by the NCAA.

“In the Bledsoe case, it got such big play and as it turned out, there was nothing to it,” Johnson said. “I never have a problem with that.

“What I do have a problem with — and John never did it and Josh [Pastner] isn’t doing it — blatant, flagrant violations. We just don’t tolerate that.”

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NEWPORT, R.I.

The Big East would have targeted Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State and Missouri, swelling its ranks to 12 football teams and 20 basketball programs, the source said.

“For the 24 hours where it looked like they were leaving [the Big 12], then this idea had legs,” the source said Tuesday at Big East football media day.

Read the full story at SNY.

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NEWPORT, R.I. –

The Panthers had 190 points in the preseason voting of media representatives from each of the eight BIG EAST markets. In addition to the 22 first-place votes, Pittsburgh had two second-place votes, making the Panthers the heaviest favorite in the preseason balloting since Louisville had 190 points in the 2005 poll. Pittsburgh and head coach Dave Wannstedt return 12 starters from last year’s team that went 10-3 overall and was 5-2 in BIG EAST play, dropping the two conference games by a combined four points. The returning players include the 2009 BIG EAST Offensive Player of the Year in tailback Dion Lewis and one of last year’s BIG EAST Defensive Players of the Year in defensive end Greg Romeus.

Cincinnati and West Virginia tied for second in the preseason poll with both teams finishing with142 points. Cincinnati (12-1, 7-0 BIG EAST in 2009) has won the last two BIG EAST titles and brings an 18-game regular-season winning streak into 2010. New head coach Butch Jones will turn to quarterback Zach Collaros to run an offense that has ranked among the nation’s best in recent years, while the Bearcats look to replace six starters on defense. West Virginia (9-4, 5-2 BIG EAST) has finished no lower than second in the BIG EAST standings in every year since 2002. Bill Stewart’s squad has 19 returning starters, including a Heisman Trophy candidate in running back Noel Devine, and expects to showcase one of the leading defenses in the BIG EAST.

A tight finish at the top of the preseason poll has Connecticut in fourth place – the highest preseason projection for the Huskies since they joined the BIG EAST. Head coach Randy Edsall has 17 starters back from last year’s 8-5 team (3-4 BIG EAST) that persevered to close last season with four straight wins after dropping five games by a combined 15 points. Connecticut’s 2010 schedule includes home dates against each of the three teams above the Huskies in the preseason poll.

Rutgers was fifth in the preseason poll with 99 points as the Scarlet Knights aim for their sixth straight winning season and fifth consecutive bowl victory. Head coach Greg Schiano led Rutgers to a 9-4 record in 2010 (3-4 BIG EAST) behind a true freshman at quarterback in Tom Savage and another rookie as a big-play threat in wideout Mohamed Sanu.

USF had 79 points to take sixth in the preseason poll. New head coach Skip Holtz inherits a team with 13 returning starters, including dual-threat quarterback B.J. Daniels. The Bulls (8-5, 3-4 BIG EAST) will have to replace three NFL draft picks and five All-BIG EAST selections on defense, however.

Syracuse was seventh in the preseason poll with 41 points. The Orange (4-8, 1-6 BIG EAST) and head coach Doug Marrone bring back 16 starters from last year’s team, including nine from a defense that was the BIG EAST’s stingiest against the run in 2009. All-BIG EAST linebacker Derrell Smith leads a veteran group in the middle. Defense also is the focus at Louisville, which was eighth in the preseason poll with 40 points. First-year head coach Charlie Strong won two BCS National Championships as Florida’s defensive coordinator and will turn to veteran linebacker Brandon Heath to lead the Cardinals (4-8, 1-6 BIG EAST) in 2010.

2010 BIG EAST FOOTBALL PRESEASON MEDIA POLL

Rank        Team                                   Pts.

1.             Pittsburgh (22)                  190

2.             Cincinnati                          142

West Virginia (1)              142

4.             Connecticut (1)                 131

5.             Rutgers                              99

6.             USF                                     79

7.             Syracuse                            41

8.             Louisville                          40

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