John Marinatto announced his resignation Monday after nearly three years as Big East commissioner. (AP)

Say this for the Big East: It didn’t drop this news on at 4:30 on a Friday. The conference announced Monday morning that John Marinatto will step down after nearly three years as league commissioner. Marinatto’s statement:

“After a great deal of thought and prayer, I have decided to step down as Commissioner of the BIG EAST Conference and formally advised our Board of Directors.”

Thought, prayer and pressure from conference presidents, according to Brett McMurphy, who first reported the story.

Marinatto presided over what will charitably be called a “tumultuous period” in league history, and realignment shifts occurring on his watch will echo at least through the 2015 season. A quick cheat sheet (see Stewart Mandel’s map of the conference square dance for a more complete picture):

• 2012: TCU joins the Big 12 instead of joining the Big East as originally planned; West Virginia leaves the Big East for the Big 12; the Big East regains Temple.

•  2013: Boise State, Houston, Memphis, San Diego State, SMU and UCF will join the Big East; Syracuse and Pitt will jump to the ACC.

• 2015: Navy will join the Big East.

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A lovingly curated selection of our favorite stories from the past week to speed you through your Friday:

A message from the Catlab Foundation For A Better Life.

• Playoff advocates kissing nurses in the street! V-BCS Day is upon us, yet somehow the hysterically misnamed EVERY GAME COUNTS Facebook page remains standing.

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Temple mascot Hooter and the Fighting Hedwigs are in talks to join the Big East in all sports. (Main image: US PRESSWIRE; inset: Warner Bros.)

Temple’s return to the Big East, if it goes through, will elevate an owl mascot to the AQ level for the first time since the school’s 2004 ejection from the conference. It’s a natural fit for the league of Squibs, but as the move is rather last-minute from a conditioning standpoint, you may find yourselves falling behind, winded in an effort to make Harry Potter jokes during league play in 2012. Below, a few basic maneuvers you might find useful, during an imaginary conference schedule that assumes the Fighting Hedwigs join up with the Ever-Increasingly Accurately Named Big East by fall:

October 6, 2012. Temple @ UConn. “Accio passing game, you guys! Amirite??”

October 13, 2012. Syracuse @ Temple. “Addazio’s offense without Bernard Pierce is deader than Dumbledore.”

October 20, 2012. Temple @ Pitt. “I tell you what, this Owls front seven has put Tino Sunseri in Azkaban.”

October 27, 2012. Rutgers @ Temple. “And what a coming-out party for Matt Brown! He blasted through the Scarlet Knights’ line like a Dementor! A Dementor on a Firebolt!”

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Happy Hearts Day, from our families to yours.

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Marshall: Determined not to let West Virginia hog the headlines. (US PRESSWIRE)

Crucial reading on topics carefully curated to contain only stories of the utmost importance to speed you through your Friday afternoon. This is our love for you.

• News you can use. CBS is reporting that West Virginia and the Big East have reached a settlement agreement, and Boise State could be leaping in early to take WVU’s place. But of far greater urgency in the Mountain State is this tidbit out of Marshall:

A West Virginia college student is suing a fraternity for negligence, claiming he fell off a deck because a bottle rocket went off in another student’s rectum.
[...]
“Instead of launching, the bottle rocket blew up in the defendant’s rectum, and this startled the plaintiff and caused him to jump back,” and fall off the deck, the lawsuit contends.

• A poet can survive everything but a misprint. We have friends who are Actual Reporters who occasionally lament that they cannot, in their professional lives, take overt swings in print at players and coaches who displease them. To them, we say: Do not abandon hope. Seen a lot of mannered comedies? Restoration-era scribes knew better than just about anybody how to slice an offending party to ribbons with pure politesse. Some of the best stone-cold bitchery we’ve ever seen in ink has come from the Associated Press. It’s more of a structured art form, like composing a sonnet, but the constraints give the finished product an elegant beauty. Today’s lesson, from ESPN.com news services:

LSU quarterback Jordan Jefferson says he believes the major reason the Tigers suffered the first shutout in BCS title game history, a 21-0 rout to Alabama on Jan. 9, was because of the offensive game plan. Jefferson, on the same day he pleaded not guilty to a simple-battery charge stemming from an Aug. 26 arrest, second-guessed the offensive play calls in an interview with Atlanta radio station WCNN.

• And speaking of poetry. Is Butch Davis taking an advisory role with Tampa Bay rather than the DC job so he can remain on UNC’s payroll? Doug Farrar tweeted that Davis “has the ethical compass God gave a wolverine,” which we find difficult to argue. What animal would you associate with Davis, gentle readers?

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The Memphis Tigers have live tigers as mascots (not pictured), but their appeal ends there. (Getty Images)

Football’s version of Manifest Destiny is ripping the space-time fabric of the sport asunder. We accept this new age of ceaseless, often senseless expansion, albeit with much sniping. In these troubled times, resurgent survivalist instincts are perhaps to be expected (she said, from her secret blogging lair stocked wall-to-wall with bottled water and guns). But this latest development is five or six bridges too far to be believed. Memphis? To a (technically) AQ conference? There is transcontinental conquest, and then there is straight-up hoarding, and we need to talk about the Big East’s behavior and its recent veer toward the latter.

No major-conference program is hankering to hitch its wagon to this sputtering star, so raiding the mid-majors is a necessity. But Memphis football is the stack of rotting newspapers in this scenario.

“But I need it!” No, Big East. You really don’t. You’re hurting your brand. You’re hurting yourself. Memphis’ financial straits regarding athletic revenue have been well-documented, its on-field product reviled as pale and listless. The Tigers haven’t won more than two games in a season since a 6-7 2008 campaign that culminated in a 41-14 walloping by USF in the St. Petersburg Bowl. The last time they went to a bowl game and actually won was 2005. This is an addition in name only, and one that dilutes a football brand that can ill afford it. What’s more: In moving away from Conference USA, Memphis is endangering a rivalry game with the greatest trophy in the history of this sport or any other.

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Like you, these fans are very unhappy about having to suffer through an interminable offseason. (AP)

Take some feel-good newsbits and unserious readings with you into the first bleak weekend of this interminable offseason. We’ll get through this together, I swear, by the blood of Terry Bowden. 

• Speaking of the offseason: It’s here. And it’s horrific. Pre-Snap Read is here to help, with 230-item to-do list to while away the winter, spring and summer with tasks from the practical (“Make a new set of house keys”) to the conciliatory (“Go to one NBA game — but that’s it”) to the fantastical (“Imagine ’95 Nebraska against 2011 Alabama”) to the downright goofy (“Don’t use chewing tobacco for a month”).

• Here’s one way: How many paranoia-induced patterns can you spot in the last AP Poll of the 2011 season? Re-rank the one-loss teams. Re-rank the four-loss teams. Marvel that Cincinnati is in there at all. We killed an hour with this at breakfast, easy.

• The greatest downtime distraction returns: The Fulmer Cup makes its triumphant re-entrance onto the national scene, with a couple false alarms already on the books but no official points tallied after three days and change. We spoke too soon! Great hustle, South Carolina! C’mon, Ohio State, get with it! Urban Meyer’s your coach now and everything!

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• On Griffin, on Kuechly, on Bullock, on Claiborne!

Western Kentucky running back Bobby Rainey earned a second-team All-America nod from SI.com after rushing for a school-record 1,695 yards. (Don McPeak-US PRESSWIRE)

SI.com’s 2011 All-America team has been released. Other familiar names on the first team: Ball, Mercilus, Richardson, Blackmon, Woods and Upshaw. (And your eyes do not deceive you: That is Western Kentucky’s Bobby Rainey down there on the second team. Yes, that is well-deserved. No, I did not get to pick this team myself.)

• Fresh coaches, bought and sold! Gus Malzahn, ten pounds of GMOOH in a five-pound bag. Arkansas State is a curious choice of destinations for reasons financial, but not geographical, and will lend credibility to our constant shilling for the Sun Belt. Fresno State is reportedly thisclose to announcing Tim DeRuyter as Pat Hill’s replacement, and UCLA will operate in the two-staff tango.

• O frabjous day! Craig James to cease polluting our airwaves?  I knew there’d be a use for this campaign poster someday.  If anybody needs me, I’ll be booking a flight to an upcoming town hall meeting to ask him to sign my copy of Swing Your Sword.

• Realignment tidbit, grudgingly dispensed. Navy to the Big East, very eventually!

• Roster blotter. Time to pop open another little hatch on your Maryland Football Transfers Advent Calendar. Two Oklahoma State linemen have been hit with misdemeanor drug charges. Mike Bellamy, suspended for the ACCCG, won’t suit up for Clemson in the Orange Bowl, either.

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The Mountain West is trying to capitalize on its one season with TCU and Boise State as members by applying for an AQ bid. (Icon SMI)

• Ask me what my job is, then ask me the hardest thing about it: The Mountain West has to look out for the Mountain West, and it’s leveraging every last iota of influence out of its one season with both Boise State and TCU to angle for a BCS auto-bid for 2012 (in which it will operate without the Big 12-bound Horned Frogs) and 2013 (when the Broncos are scheduled to make their exit for the Big East).

• Fresh coaches, bought and sold! Colorado State is expected to announce Alabama offensive coordinator Jim McElwain as the next head coach of the Rams this afternoon. McElwain has been Nick Saban’s coordinator since 2008; this will be his first head coaching position. And Toledo has replaced the recently departed Tim Beckman with his offensive coordinator, Matt Campbell, a three-year veteran of the Rockets’ staff.

• Dispatches from Happy Valley: You can relive the brief proceedings of Jerry Sandusky’s preliminary hearing here, but if you missed his court appearance, you didn’t miss much: Sandusky and his legal team waived the right to the hearing, and the case is going to trial.

• Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly: Boston College linebacker Luke Kuechly, who’s already got the Butkus, Lombardi and Lott IMPACT Awards, and of whom we are becoming very fond because he’s a killy defender who looks like a big ol’ mathlete, can add the Bronco Nagurski Trophy to his groaning hardware shelf.

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TCU offensive coordinator Justin Fuente knows he just accepted the Memphis FOOTBALL coaching job, right? (US PRESSWIRE)

• Fresh coaches, bought and sold: News from the carousel: As Scout’s John Martin first reported, TCU offensive coordinator Justin Fuente is next in line for the Memphis meat-grinder — though not before a similar square dance first reeled in, then lost Jim McElwain. On paper, this looks like a solid get for the Tigers; what Fuente expects to get out of such a topsy-turvy administrative support scenario is known only to Fuente. Arizona State’s negotiations with June Jones have fallen through, in a manner that drove Jones’ agent to social media to express his bewilderment. Urbz hits the road to rake in future Buckeyes. Bill Byrne blames the big, mean internet for forcing him to fire Mike Sherman over the phone. And Ted Roof will trouble Auburn no more.

• Not a lawyer, but thinking this figure is waaaay low: Jerry Sandusky spent Wednesday night in jail following his arrest on new sex abuse charges. He posted $250,000 bail Thursday morning. Sandusky has been placed under house arrest as a condition of his release.

• A bad day gets worse: Oregon State defensive tackle Fred Thompson, who collapsed Wednesday playing basketball on campus, has died at the unforgivable age of 19. The cause of death was initially reported as a heart attack. Our sincere condolences and best wishes to Thompson’s family, the Beavers team, and the Oregon State football community.

• Realignment tidbits, grudgingly dispensed: The Big East makes its many-tentacled expansion official, and will go national (right, so that’s how they’re spinning this) without the Air Force Academy.

• Bowltyme! Brett McMurphy runs down shakeups in the BCS AQ system.

• Quote of the day: ”Fun Fact: Robert Griffin, if he wins, would be the first Heisman winner to wear Angry Birds socks since Paul Hornug.” — Dan Rubenstein

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