Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese said Wednesday that he chose not to take action last month when Rutgers picked up a football game against an FIU team that was scheduled to play USF, but also said the league will likely adopt new policies to avoid such a problem in the future.

"It's over with now, and I've talked to both schools about it, expressed my feelings about it," Tranghese said. "We're going to talk about it as a league this summer and adopt some specific rules. ... We're going to talk about cutoff dates, where School A from our league can't pick up something from School B, that kind of thing."

FIU was under contract to play USF on Sept. 19 in Tampa as the final game of a three-game series, but exercised a buyout and signed a home-and-home contract with Rutgers. USF coach Jim Leavitt expressed disappointment that one Big East school would knowingly put another league school in such an imposition.

Tranghese said he wants Big East schools to insist on more prohibitive buyouts in 2-for-1 contracts, where a league team hosts two games in exchange for one road game. USF's deal with FIU had just a $200,000 buyout and no end date, allowing the Panthers to leave the Bulls without an opponent late in the scheduling process.

"More and more people are breaking contracts, and we're going to talk about ways of getting ourselves protected," Tranghese said. "The area that concerns me is when people do 2-for-1 games. What happens is you play at home, then you go there, then they break and they pay. My theory is what we've got to do is up the ante so much that the third year is played."

Tranghese said he sympathizes with the scheduling challenge facing Big East programs, which need five nonconference games, and said USF shouldn't face criticism for having two Division I-AA opponents on its 2009 schedule, because it wasn't by the Bulls' design.

"It's out of necessity," Tranghese said. "As I said to (USF athletic director Doug Woolard), in your particular case, I wouldn't worry about it. Noone's going to claim you're not playing a great football schedule because you've got Florida State, you've got Miami, plus the league. We can explain why you've got the second I-AA. You got trapped into it. I told Doug, 'You don't have a PR problem here because this wasn't caused by you.' It's really hard to schedule five football games, and when people start to play this game, it just exacerbates the problem."