In late July, Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese sat in an auditorium at Big East media day, and declared that despite pleading from several Big East coaches, the conference was not interested in adding a ninth football school.

Tranghese’s reason was twofold: the Big East already has 16 members in non-football sports, and there were no teams out there that met the conference’s criteria for admission.Even with Tranghese retiring after this season, it is unlikely expansion will happen any time soon, mostly because of resistance from the member schools’ presidents.

But whoever is appointed to succeed Tranghese should strongly consider adding East Carolina as a football-only member.The notion of doing such has been floated before, but has become more appealing with the continued growth of the East Carolina program, which was showcased Saturday when the Pirates beat — it wasn’t really even an upset — Virginia Tech in Charlotte in a nationally televised game.Adding a ninth football member is a popular concept with coaches and athletic directors because having only seven conference games in a 12-game regular season has often left coaches scrambling to schedule enough non-conference games.

Rutgers had that problem this past spring, when the Scarlet Knights’ schedule wasn’t finalized until April.Having seven non-conference games also creates disparity in the schedules of Big East teams, four of which play four conference home games and four of which play just three.

Look no further than Rutgers’ 2006 season for evidence that the disparity makes a difference. In Big East games, the Scarlet Knights went 3-0 at home that year and 2-2 on the road.

Had they played four home games instead of three, as they did last year, they would have stood a far better chance of winning an extra game — and the conference championship of which they came one win short.Tranghese is right to have high admissions standards for potential members.

Adding a ninth football member would be counterproductive if the team would bring down the quality of the league, so despite Temple’s improvement under coach Al Golden, it wouldn’t make sense to reinstate the Owls, who were essentially ousted from the league after the 2002 season.

It would also be unwise to expand the conference in any sports other than football, given that 16 teams is already four more any other conference.

But adding East Carolina as a football-only member would have no impact on the constitution of the league in non-football sports, and would substantially improve the quality of the football conference while solving the scheduling problem and satisfying the league’s coaches.

Why would the Pirates improve the conference?For starters, if they joined the league next year, they would instantly be among the top four or five teams. That’s more than could be said of South Florida or Cincinnati when they joined the conference along with Louisville in 2005. At that time, Cincinnati had been a mediocre Conference USA team with a tiny fan base.

South Florida’s program was in an even less developed stage: The school had only had a football team for seven years.East Carolina, on the other hand, has a team that could crack the top 25 at some point this season, one of the country’s rising coaching stars in Skip Holtz, and a hungry fan base that would be certain to grow if its team were in a BCS conference.

Here’s something else the future commissioner should consider: Saturday’s results did more than remind us of how good East Carolina is and how good it can be in the future.

They also reminded us of the Big East’s flaws.Pittsburgh, ranked 25th in the AP poll and thought by many to be a rising power, lost at home to Bowling Green. And Syracuse, a program that not too long ago gave us Donovan McNabb and Marvin Harrison, showed again how far it has fallen by losing to Northwestern — the Big Ten’s version of Syracuse — by 20 points.

Those results reminded us that before the Big East definitively dismisses East Carolina, it should look in the mirror and realize Connecticut — which shared the league title last year with West Virginia — came within a blown call last year of losing at home to Temple, and that there is no guarantee Louisville will return to national relevance any time soon.

The Big East still has a perennial national title contender in West Virginia and a pair of fledgling powers in South Florida and Rutgers. Dismissing claims that the conference doesn’t deserve a spot at the BCS table, its champions have won three straight BCS games, and a fourth is certainly possible this year.

Granting East Carolina admission as a football-only member wouldn’t just be good for the Pirates.

It’d be good for the Big East, too.