and what exactly have they actually done in say the last 25 years? not much…
The Big East has pretty much been considered the joke of the BCS conferences. Pitt’s stellar bcs bowl performance did nothing to help that situation. Although the Mountain West conference is known to be quite a powerhouse division 
Agreed. Although they have had that problem for quite some time. Even when they still had the on-campus stadium the sell-outs were when Notre Dame, Miami, Penn State, or WVU would be in town. A lot of the other games had tons of empty seats with exaggerated ticket sales due to Pitt packaging their tickets in plans so you had to buy the sucky games if you wanted to get the good games. Good idea for selling tickets but still left a lot of empty seats.
Going off-campus with the stadium was definitely a horrible move, especially if you want to attract students or have some tradition.
The Big 10 has rather consistently had teams that have performed quite well against any conference. It will be interesting to see how they fare this year in the bowls seeing as how almost the entire conference is playing in them.
The Big East has been touted this year but who exactly have they been beating? Cincinnati and Connecticut have supposedly risen to greatness however who exactly have they played aside from other overrated Big East teams? The only suposedly good teams they beat are other Big East teams that were far from proven. Rutgers and Louisville have had flashes of becoming something but have not strung together anything worth noting and have not shown much. South Florida showed they were nothing to take serious either.