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.

Love this line: "Try as it might, football couldn’t kill the basketball star."

The BIG EAST being back is good for College Basketball...Fox TV Contract, great coaches like Chris Mack, Ed Cooley and Jay Wright. Just needs St. John's to become itself again.

(04-03-2016 10:56 AM)Maize Wrote:  The BIG EAST being back is good for College Basketball...Fox TV Contract, great coaches like Chris Mack, Ed Cooley and Chris Mack. Just needs St. John's to become itself again.

or Georgetown quite frankly.

(04-03-2016 10:57 AM)stever20 Wrote:  

(04-03-2016 10:56 AM)Maize Wrote:  The BIG EAST being back is good for College Basketball...Fox TV Contract, great coaches like Chris Mack, Ed Cooley and Jay Wright. Just needs St. John's to become itself again.

or Georgetown quite frankly.

Still have faith in JT3...he will right the ship.

JT3 need to go. Talk about underachieving with the talent he has on his roster. I would love to see a young hungry up-in-coming coach take over. Unfortuneatly his dad has a lot of influence in the university.

I saw someone comparing the situation at Georgetown today with the situation at DePaul back when Joey Meyer was coach. Nepotism killing the program.

I'm hoping that JT3 saw what happened at the end of the season- he started to press a lot more, and had some success with that. Hopefully that'll continue. Especially seeing how teams in the tourney this year- a lot of them just couldn't handle the pressure at all...

Congrats Nova! Awesome performance.

The issue for the BE wasn't FB trying to smother BB with a pillow like this article is implying. The issue was always the hybrid between FB and basketball schools and their very different priorities because not everyone had the same major sports.

Syracuse and UConn could have given up on FB and stayed with the BE again but both schools value their FB program too much....which is completely counter to schools like Villanova and St Johns

JT3 is good enough to make the tournament most every year. That's good enough to keep the Son of the Great Man on the throne indefinitely. Compare the bird-in-the-hand of 8 NCAA's in 11 years to Craig Esherick, or Josh PAstner, or Matt Doherty, or any number of others.

(04-03-2016 12:08 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  JT3 is good enough to make the tournament most every year. That's good enough to keep the Son of the Great Man on the throne indefinitely. Compare the bird-in-the-hand of 8 NCAA's in 11 years to Craig Esherick, or Josh PAstner, or Matt Doherty, or any number of others.

dream scenario is that Lee Reed (Hoya AD) gets the boot and JT3 becomes the new AD.

Will never happen but that is what a lot of the fan base is pushing for.

(04-03-2016 10:51 AM)GoldenWarrior11 Wrote:  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.

The Big East was "left for dead"? Who knew? When did that happen?

(04-03-2016 12:25 PM)ken d Wrote:  

(04-03-2016 10:51 AM)GoldenWarrior11 Wrote:  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.

The Big East was "left for dead"? Who knew? When did that happen?

Probably when ESPN aired Requim for the Big East.

I dont know anyone who thought the Big East was left for dead. Lots of good programs in the conference.
Also, someone tell Jay Wright that Villanova has a football team.

I say all the evidence is not yet in on the 2010-2014 realignment and we won't know the real results until around 2020.

Fact is 14 out of the sweet 16 this year were from P5 conferences. 3 out of the final 4 were from P5 conferences. If that pattern repeats itself in future years, you won't see many non-P5 teams winning the national championship.

And conferences like the Big East will start slowly declining like the MVC did with an occasional great team but more typically only getting about 3 bids max and many times nobody in the Sweet 16.

Time will tell, I guess.

yeah I guess games like Northern Iowa prove how superior the ******* p5 is. Screw that.

The only people that left the BE for dead is the media.

The MVC has been in a steady decline for years. Wichita St and UNI are the exceptions.

It'll be interesting to see how well the current Big East schools replace their head coaches. Seems like that would be where the money differential will start to show up as a negative.

(04-03-2016 07:43 PM)WakeForestRanger Wrote:  It'll be interesting to see how well the current Big East schools replace their head coaches. Seems like that would be where the money differential will start to show up as a negative.

only thing none of the current coaches are all that old. Won't be anytime soon any of them need to be replaced.