At one point I had some measure of respect for Mike Tranghese. No, not as Big East Commissioner. As a shrewd political manipulator. He held the Big East together in 2003 because he terrified the football schools that if they broke away, he wouldn’t be their commissioner and they would lose his personal relationship with all the other BCS commissioners and thus get frozen out of the BCS. For the basketball side, he kept them in line when they were convinced they could survive without the football side.
Then he retired and as the Big East has been raided and re-tooled and jury-rigged to stay together, Tranghese has to keep talking about how he knew all of this was going to happen. That he could see it all coming a mile away. Now he’s saying the same thing about Notre Dame’s departure.
Tranghese said he wasn’t surprised, saying that he told the rest of the league for quite a while that if the Irish could find a conference home, they would leave. The only schools that might be bothered by Notre Dame’s departure are the Big East’s non-football schools, “who enjoyed that rivalry.”
The man has amazing vision, right? Of course, he did nothing about it. Just like he did nothing about Pitt, Syracuse and WVU. At best it means he set his friend John Marinatto up for complete failure.
The likely reality. Tranghese is completely full of crap. He just keeps trying to keep his own image in shape so he can land that next “consulting” gig. I’m sure ECU is trying to reach him right now.
they played BE schools such as Uconn to compensate. The nation cant wait to watch Temple play Memphis in FB.
Can’t wait until Pitt moves to a real conference and by the way
That conference will be the best conference for hoops. Note
Calhoun picked a perfect time to bail out!!
Either Pitt is very forgiving or like everything else the $$$ is king.
PS I love the move.
Nice to have a seat at the table, regardless of how we got here.
@ TX Panther
I agree, that is why we need better leadership. And I’m talking about those who sit above the head football coach.
It is an embarrassment to college football.
Apparently he has developed a nervous tick since taking that job, and was obviously blinking away with various facial spasms everytime one of the announcers posed a question regarding the current state of the Big East with the departures of Syracuse, Pitt and now ND on the horizon.
I loved that he refused to answer any of those pointed questions but fell back reliably on the old argument that the Big East remains the strongest basketball conference in the nation. EXACTLY. And that is the essence of the underlying problems with this conference, a bunch of basketball playing universities attempting to dictate the direction of their conference while buried heads in the sand neglecting the golden goose of college atheltic finances FOOTBALL.
No matter how bad Pitt is playing football right now, at least we have the comfort of knowing that we are out of that dysfunctional conference, finally, come next season.