A thumb-sucker of a piece bemoaning the friendly end to the Big East as we knew it. Not the present incarnation. The one that existed for maybe 3 years.
The weather is still brutal, but the Big East Conference, as we knew it, is vanishing. Boston College, one of the original foul-weather seven, is making its last appearance in the tournament this week, with some bad vibrations going around.
Next season the Big East becomes a mega-conference, 16 teams stretching all the way to DePaul, Marquette, Louisville, Cincinnati and South Florida, wherever that is.
The Big East is becoming a made-for-power-ratings conference, full of implication for the screamers on the sports channels, an unholy alliance only as good as its automatic bid to the Bowl Championship Series in football, but losing its identity, gambling its soul.
“Becoming?” Please. The Big East was formed for TV in the first place. This is the conference that first jumped in with ESPN.
There was a certain unity when Syracuse, Georgetown, St. John’s, Connecticut, Boston College, Seton Hall and Providence played a six-game schedule in 1979-80. They were Northeastern colleges, all reachable by a team bus or a car packed with students, who might even feel the dedication to rush back along Interstate 95 for an 8 a.m. class.
It was nothing like today’s bloated 12-team conference, which had Notre Dame, West Virginia and Pittsburgh all stacked up Tuesday night, unable to land in New York, a symbol of a conference perhaps grown too big. The West Virginia players told tales of malfunctioning de-icers causing them to land in Scranton, Pa., and hazardous spills causing delays on their subsequent bus ride to New York.
You want to know another reason why Pitt fans don’t kow-tow to the past of Big East greatness — provincial pieces like this that all but admit that they feel the purity of the conference was lost the day Pitt joined. And that was 20 years ago.
For a better read on the future of the Big East, with an eye on the past, you have to go to Chicago.
The Big East was formed May 30, 1979, when a group of like-minded men formalized talks that had begun in a hotel room in Queens, N.Y.
League founder Dave Gavitt, then athletic director at Providence, had called old friends Jack Kaiser and Frank Rienzo, the athletic directors at St. John’s and Georgetown, and proposed they organize a conference. In short order, Syracuse AD Jake Crouthamel, who had been Gavitt’s college fraternity brother, was in on the talks.
“My goal was to have representation in all of the major markets of the East, tying them together from Washington north and not leaving out any hotbeds–Providence, Syracuse and Connecticut being three,” Gavitt said in a telephone interview last week.
Initially, Gavitt said, the inner circle resisted inviting Connecticut. But Gavitt was adamant the Huskies needed to be part of the nascent league.
“They were a middle-of-the-road [program], but it was a state school and it had the support of the whole state of Connecticut,” Kaiser said. “We just felt there was tremendous potential there.”
“Providence,” “basketball” and “hotbed” are not words commonly used together — unless you happend to be the former head coach and AD at a school there. Still, there is not nearly as much of the gauzy, things were so much better. There is also a very clear view of what will be happening in the next few years:
“If you took an all-star team of Cincinnati, of DePaul, of Louisville and of the teams in this league, with Marquette, that kid who’s hurt,” said Calhoun, referring to Golden Eagles senior guard Travis Diener, “and then added them to the guys in this league, how could you even have a five-player [all-conference team]? You can’t. It would be absolutely ridiculous.”
Ridiculously talented, that is.
“You say top-heavy or bottom-heavy,” Georgetown coach John Thompson III said. “Our league will just be heavy.”
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Clearly, the new league will be brutally competitive.“A lot of coaches are going to be getting fired,” Diener said.
“Travis is a very smart young man,” Thompson III said.
The point? That in a conference this deep, a program could be one of the best in the country but barely among the best in the conference.
“You could be 7-9 [in Big East play] and be a very good team,” Boeheim said.
“This is going to be a great league for fans and a great league for players, because players want to play the best players,” Tranghese said. “I think it’s going to be a very, very hard league for coaches.”
While the league will grow by four teams, it still will have only 12 teams competing in the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden.
Tranghese felt strongly that bringing more teams would hurt the top four teams in the league, which would have to give up their first-round byes, and ultimately harm the Big East’s chances of winning the national championship.
Think about that. Can you imagine the pressure to fire a coach when a team sinks for a couple of years and doesn’t even get to the Big East Tournament? If you are taking bets on some of the first coaches to go, look to New Jersey.
Once, the Big East basketball tournament announced itself across the marquee on Seventh Avenue boldly and brightly, a glimmering proclamation worthy of the stars descended on Madison Square Garden. Those days are promising to return again next season, when the conference’s best recruiting class in years includes Louisville’s Rick Pitino and Cincinnati’s Bob Huggins, with Marquette and DePaul bringing hot young coaches and dazzling prospects.
Everything is getting bigger, better and bolder in the Big East, except the two programs across the Hudson River. As Seton Hall left the floor Wednesday night, blowing a big, late lead to lose, 56-51, to Georgetown, the Pirates would’ve been wise to take a good, long look around the Garden, because it could be a long time before they make it back for a Big East tournament. Rutgers is an even longer shot to qualify in the new Big East, where the bottom four teams each year will be left out of the tournament bracket.
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As one Big East assistant coach said: “Those two teams are in a lot of trouble, because I don’t think those staffs can keep up the recruiting pace they’re going to need moving forward right now. As it is, they’re treading water.”
And that sort of thing will add to the pressure to split the conference. Programs suffer as some teams remain on the bottom — costing the athletic departments money in lost tickets, merchandise, etcetera. Then the pressure to fire the coach — and the inevitable buy outs. More money lost, and the lack of national exposure — unless you are one of the top teams when expected — all will drive the split.
Like I’ve said, the BE will last about 5 years in the format. Here are the coaches that will be fired in that time: Gary Waters, Rutgers; Louis Orr, Seton Hall; Tim Welsh, Providence; whoever is the coach of South Florida; and Mike Brey, Notre Dame. The majority will find the pressure to win significantly increased. The only safe coaches are: Jim Calhoun, UConn; Jim Boeheim, Syracuse; Bob Huggins, Cinci; Rick Pitino, Louisville; Tom Crean, Marquette. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle.
