West Virginia daily

If the University of Cincinnati has learned one lesson during its first season in the Big East Conference, it's that joining a Bowl Championship Series conference doesn't necessarily make you a BCS-caliber program.

"We're a program that has been up and down and has been through the different levels of football," UC coach Mark Dantonio said Tuesday. "We've now reached the BCS level, which I'm very proud of and very excited about. Now we have to start playing to that level at some point."

Dantonio remains confident that the Bearcats will ascend to that level despite the 38-0 shellacking they absorbed last week at the hands of No. 16 West Virginia.

But he concedes that watching West Virginia play, with its higher caliber of athletes, was a wakeup call, one more reminder of how far UC has to go before it reaches its destination as a bona fide BCS-caliber program.

"It forces you to be a realist when you play a Penn State or a West Virginia or for that matter a Louisville, which I hate to admit," Dantonio said. "You see where you have to go. That's where we're at. We are a relatively young team. Our players will grow and get better as we move ahead and will grow physically."

Even though it was difficult to watch his team dominated so thoroughly by the Mountaineers, Dantonio said he wasn't discouraged. After leading a senior-dominated team to a 7-5 record and an appearance in the Fort Worth Bowl last year, Dantonio said this season is really like his first running the UC program, with only a handful of seniors who play regularly.

Next season, he says, almost the entire team will return with an additional year of experience and another year in the weight room. The Bearcats also will have the influx of new players from Dantonio's third recruiting class.

The second-year UC coach says he can project ahead to 2008, when this year's freshmen are seniors, and see the Bearcats being competitive with the best teams in the Big East.

But he's familiar enough with the history of the UC football program to know that it's not OK to field a competitive team only every three or four years. In fact, that might be one reason why this program has never captured the imagination of local sports fans.

Rick Minter took over and went 2-8-1 in his first season. He followed that with a couple of 6-5 seasons and then an 8-4 season in 1997. But in 1998, the Bearcats slipped again to 3-8.

Dantonio pointed to UC's recent games against West Virginia as a prime example of where the program has been. The Bearcats lost to the Mountaineers by three points at home in 2002 and beat them by two at West Virginia in 2003. But this season, they were overwhelmed by the same program.

"To me, UC has always been like this," he said, waving his hand up and down. "They have a good year, then all those guys leave and they're down here. Then finally when those guys get to be juniors and seniors, they have enough experience again to play.

"Our challenge will be to be like this as we move," he said, again using his hand to demonstrate a steady upward progression. "From this period on, will it be like this or will it still dip and roll back and forth?"

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