GoldenWarrior11
Heisman
Posts: 5,684
Joined: Jul 2015
Reputation: 610
I Root For: Marquette, BE
Location: Chicago
|
Wetzel: Left for Dead, Big East Still Alive and Thriving
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/left-for-de...ncaab.html
HOUSTON – Over the last decade or so, the football-driven machinations of conference realignment attempted to make impossible the following bit of reality: Villanova, of the Big East, is playing for the national title on Monday.
If College Sports Inc. couldn’t rewrite the rules of basketball so you received a couple extra baskets if you had an 80,000-seat stadium on campus, it could try to squeeze everyone out with money and TV contracts and bloated conference memberships. It could try to leave the Big East, where basketball matters most, as some relic of the past, a quaint but ultimately quiet old place.
Villanova 95, Oklahoma 51 – and, yes, you could hear that Big East roar here.
Try as it might, football couldn’t kill the basketball star.
“Well, the game was played in a football stadium,” John Paquette, the Big East's longtime associate commissioner, said with a smile in reference to the NFL’s cavernous NRG Stadium. You can’t fault the conference for enjoying every moment of this.
It was rocked by realignment that saw even bedrock programs leave for football reasons – even as most found more money but less actual competitive success. So in 2013, the Big East reinvented itself.
An awkward marriage with football was out. Back in was something akin to its roots, 10 teams, all private schools, mostly Catholic and big-city-based. Mostly it was filled with schools that unapologetically embraced hoops as their preferred sport.
You wouldn’t think loving basketball could possibly be seen as a negative in the sport of basketball, but college athletics employs plenty of inexplicable conventional wisdoms. This one said that private schools, especially without football money flooding in, were going to struggle.
The Big East has been a dominant conference in this sport since its inception in 1979 – league teams captured seven national titles. With Syracuse and Connecticut and Louisville and others gone though, it needed to reprove that this could still happen.
“A lot of pride,” Jay Wright, who has coached Villanova since 2001, said of reaching the title game. “We reinvented ourselves. That's what we did in a time when college athletics is really being run by football."
“I'm a huge college football fan,” Wright continued. “I love it. But there are a lot of great basketball schools. We all got together. That's just what we are. We're basketball schools. We make all our decisions athletically about basketball. That's our lead sport. We just wanted to get together and see where we fit in this world of football."
“We don't have a goal to be the greatest league in the world," Wright said. "We're authentic. We're all basketball schools. We're in metropolitan areas. It's the biggest sport.”
What Villanova showed Saturday in trouncing Oklahoma is what league schools have been showing all season. Whether it's tradition, or the fact hoops matters most, or facilities, or coaching, or proximity to talent, or major markets, or the league tournament still being played in Madison Square Garden, great players still want to play here.
Butler, Providence, Seton Hall and Xavier also made the tournament. The league feels like it has regained its footing and is on the upswing.
“It's sort of a dream come true because when we went down this path a couple years ago, this was the ultimate goal,” commissioner Val Ackerman said. “Not just to compete for a national championship but to win one with this group of schools. It was to prove that the Big East could be good with this group of schools ... it’s surreal in many ways.”
It’s surreal because of how this is being done, via blunt force. Nova is deep and dominating and dangerous. Offensively, the Wildcats shot 71.4 percent on Saturday and had seven players reach double figures, unheard of numbers in college hoops. Defensively, they shut down Sooner star Buddy Hield, holding him to just nine points. About midway through the second half, if not earlier, a thoroughly humiliated OU effectively quit on the game.
The 44-point margin of victory was the biggest in Final Four history, yet sort of par for the tournament for the Wildcats. There was a thrilling five-point victory over the tournament's top seed, Kansas, in the Elite Eight. The other four victories thus far, however, are by an average of 29 points a game.
This is no underdog. This is one of those old Big East bullies, coming into Monday night brimming with well-earned confidence.
That the old days are still here again is not taken lightly. Everyone at a basketball school across the country knows how precarious things felt back in the churn of realignment, how schools were jumping for life rafts believing football is all that mattered.
It turns out the Titanic is still cruising along rather well.
“This event is bigger than the four-team football championship to our schools,” Wright said. “You can see by our fans out there. It's just what we are. We're just trying to be the best we can be.
“We know we have to prove ourselves because we're new. Not because we're not good, because we're reinvented. I'm really happy for our league, happy that our league is in the finals, as happy as I am for Villanova.”
Left if not for dead, but for mid-major mediocrity, the Big East is alive and fine and proudly playing on Monday ... in a football stadium in Texas. Kickoff is 9:19 p.m. ET.
|
|