Breathe easy, Atlantic Coast Conference fans. At least your league's lead role in this torturous game of Realignment Twister is winding down.

	Louisville AD Tom Jurich (left) courted Rick Pitino; now his school may be courted.

(That is, pending announcement of the Hogwarts Fighting Wizards as the 12th ACC school, in a contentious vote, over the University of Mars. Duke, of course, leads the resistance to inclusion of the Little Green Men. Travel costs, the Dookies say.)

For schools like Louisville, the draining and dizzying daily drama of waiting for the first conference dominoes to fall was merely prelude. Now that Miami and Virginia Tech have officially forsaken the Big East, the Cardinals are on the clock. They're the popular choice to be the next selection in the conference free-agent draft.

Driven by the big-picture vision of athletic director Tom Jurich, Louisville has aggressively positioned itself for this very opportunity to step up a level in athletic class. The Conference USA Cardinals spend more money on varsity sports than any other non-BCS school ($32 million last year); they play in a sparkling six-year-old football stadium; they hired future Hall of Fame basketball coach Rick Pitino to succeed current Hall of Famer Denny Crum; they were No. 3 nationally in basketball attendance last year, trailing only Syracuse and No. 1 neighbor Kentucky; and they've steadily diminished image-tarnishing problems with gender equity, academic performance and NCAA compliance.

So with a bolstered resume, Louisville awaits a wink, a nod, a nudge -- some kind of signal -- from some other league. And C-USA continues its tepid efforts to protect its flanks.

Jurich said that once the ACC struck, his first priority would be a conversation with C-USA commissioner Britton Banowsky. He had it Monday via telephone. Banowsky spent last week in Central America, which wouldn't seem like ideal out-of-the-country timing for the commissioner of the next conference that could be raided -- unless Banowsky was making an expansion site visit of his own to the University of Costa Rica.

(Then again, urgency isn't Banowsky's forte. He was named C-USA boss last October but hasn't moved from Dallas to Chicago, where the C-USA league offices are located. Meanwhile, the commuting commish could be watching the Big East do unto C-USA what the ACC did unto the Big East.)

Louisville would have to pay $500,000 to exit C-USA, in addition to possibly forfeiting some shares of NCAA Tournament basketball revenue. Pending that trendiest of stopgap measures -- the lawsuit -- the penalty for leaving would not seem insurmountable.

But what was viewed six long, strange weeks ago as a slam dunk -- Louisville to the Big East -- can no longer be seen as such, if only because ACC commish John Swofford's slam dunks kept clanging off the rim. Most everyone still expects Louisville to wind up in the Big East, and without the drawn-out shenanigans of Realignment Round I.

The worldview, however, is different today than it was in mid-May. For starters, nobody anticipated the Big East losing both its football heavyweights. That throws the league's BCS status into some doubt -- and BCS status has been driving Louisville's upgrade efforts since its inception.

The second complicating issue is the titillating Missing Team in the ACC's grand plan, which called for an expansion to 12 teams but has currently stalled at 11. If Notre Dame won't return the ACC's calls, could Swofford & Co., possibly dial the Cards' number?

As for issue No. 1: A lot of people are hopeful that the Big East will retain its BCS status -- at least for the remainder of the entity's television contract -- for a couple of reasons. One is the clout of commissioner Mike Tranghese, current head of the BCS. The other is the fact that if the Big East loses BCS status, more than half of the I-A football schools would be in non-BCS leagues -- and the haves are scared of handing majority status to the have-nots.

But the league's numbers aren't dazzling. Using the Sagarin Ratings from the past five years, the top four football members of what remains of the Big East -- Syracuse, Boston College, West Virginia and Pittsburgh -- would have a hard time meriting BCS inclusion. The average ranking of the four since 1998 ranges from 36th (Syracuse) to 55th (Pittsburgh).

Louisville would fit comfortably in the middle at 45th. But even if the Big East isn't automatic BCS material, the Cardinals would still be getting into a better football league than C-USA. Syracuse, BC, Pitt and West Virginia all have been rated in Sagarin's top 30 at least once in the past two years, while Louisville was the only C-USA school to get that high. And C-USA's dead weight at the bottom of the league (Army, Houston, Memphis, Tulane, UAB) is heavier than the Big East's (Rutgers and ambitious Connecticut).

And the basketball lineup is potentially dazzling. The Big East losing Virginia Tech and keeping Syracuse was a dance-in-the-streets development for Louisville basketball interests, which remain the driving force in the athletic program.

As for issue No. 2, the ACC: Forget about it. Louisville fits the ACC academic profile the way a thong fits Nate Newton. According to NCAA academic reports, Louisville's average general-student graduation rates over its most recent four classes is 10 percent in four years and 31 percent in six years.

Simply put, the urban commuter school's academic mission has nothing in common with the missions at Duke, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, North Carolina and Virginia.

Now, it could be argued that Florida State was hardly a Harvard-level addition to the ACC, and that Miami and Virginia Tech were lesser academic institutions than the spurned twosome of Boston College and Syracuse. It's true that academics is not driving the ACC expansion bus, but at some point presidents at the league's ivy-walled institutions will put on the brakes.

Louisville is that point.

So after a protracted holding pattern, it's now the Cardinals' time to touch down -- and the Big East would seem the likely landing spot. But if the ACC fiasco has taught us anything, it's to expect turbulence before touchdown.

Pat Forde covers college football for the Louisville Courier-Journal.