MORGANTOWN — The Big East’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness.
The conference’s greatest strength is as a basketball conference.
No other conference in the country, not even the ACC with North Carolina and Duke, comes close.
But it is a basketball conference operating in a football world.
For whatever reason, football drives this bus and at times it seems they play basketball only to fill the days between BCS Championship games.
With all this talk about conference expansion, especially in the Big Ten, which may be big but is not ten and is looking to be even bigger, have you so much as heard an utterance about basketball?
This is about football and football only, about television networks that draw huge audiences on Saturday afternoon and Saturday night, to say nothing of Thursday — or, whenever they really feel like playing.
This is about big cities, not about the Charlestons of the world, be they in West Virginia or South Carolina.
Think about the Big East for a moment. It was founded to play basketball, an elite group of eastern schools, mostly Catholic universities with names like St. John’s and Villanova and Georgetown, schools that knew they had a made-for-TV product where there was a big market and schools that didn’t so much as even mess with big time football.
It was a conference built without so much as a dream of winning the Heisman Trophy.
Football was a sidelight, a hobby almost. Bring in your West Virginias and your Pitts. They’ll add some TV interest in the fall and win a few games and add to the conference’s prestige … but if they were really going to make it in the Big East it had to be as a basketball power.
That’s just the way it worked.
The problem was that the big money in college sports today comes from the NCAA basketball tournament and football.
Just this week, WVU got a check for $1 million for reaching the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament.
A very nice chunk of change, you say.
Doesn’t pay the coach’s salary.
Not even close.
Now, put 60,000 people in Mountaineer Field seven times in a year, at say $60 a pop. That’s $3.6 million per game.
That is a nice chunk of change.
Toss in now a conference kickback of $22 million per school, as the Big Ten received this year from its Big Ten network and you understand we’re not talking about playing for that $1 million check from the NCAA for giving them a month-long television spectacular that captures the nation’s imagination.
Basketball is nice, but you pay the bills with the football revenue.
Considering that the Big East’s strength is basketball and not football, you have it staggering through the woods of college athletics like a wounded deer.
You don’t, for a moment, think that Mike Tranghese didn’t see some of the writing on the wall when he retired from the conference he literally helped found, do you?
The Big East meets this weekend. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.
How do you keep Rutgers from jumping to the Big Ten, if invited? How do you keep Syracuse from going, if asked? What do you say to Notre Dame, which could give your Big East Conference a tremendous boost by joining as a football member, but who remains on the outside in that sport, again because that is where the money is and it is too greedy to share it with its conference brethren.
Behind the scenes, the conference is already looking toward its own survival in the world that it originally was intended for. The New York Post’s Lenn Robbins reported this week that it is making contingency plans to go on as a basketball conference without such schools as Pitt and Rutgers and Syracuse and Connecticut.
According to Robbins, the non-football playing schools have talked about possibly adding Dayton, Duquesne, St. Joseph’s and Xavier, to get back to its Catholic school roots.
There is, of course, hope that the Big East will not be savaged, that the Big Ten will add only one team to go to 12 in its football conference, allowing it to play divisions and have a championship game, thereby not setting off a round of conference expansion that would change the landscape.
There is also a chance — one fueled by riches once not even dare dreamed about — that the entire playing field will change within the next couple of years.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
