(10-08-2013 12:55 PM)adcorbett Wrote: (10-08-2013 10:40 AM)Dr. Isaly von Yinzer Wrote: As a Pitt fan who well remembers that time, I just want to set the record straight on this next part and at the very least provide some context...
When I was reading that I thought there was some revisionist history. And there was a lot of that in there, including not understanding why the BE schools did what they did. I am not saying they made all the right moves, obviously they didn't, but the author brushes over the realities at the times as inconsequential to decision making based on what happened 25 years later. And you can can't do that.
That's exactly right, corbett!
I still think everyone involved (including both Pitt and Penn State) would have been better off in the long run if we had somehow managed to cobble together a Northeastern all sports league to rival what the ACC had constructed in the South. I know Pitt is not better off by not playing our two primary historical rivals: Penn State and West Virginia.
It's just that Paterno was sooooooooooo powerful and could be so difficult to deal with that I'm not sure that ever would have been possible on anything approaching reasonable terms for everyone other than Penn State.
That's my point.
Don't get me wrong, Pitt's admin at the time was the textbook definition of the word buffoonery. However, on that particular front, I have a hard time blaming them as literally every other school in the Northeast also sided with BC and SU over PSU on that issue. That should tell you all you need to know about who was being most intransigent.
To draw a present day parallel, it would be like Florida State and Clemson saying to everyone else in the ACC:
"Hey guys, we've been thinking about it and have decided that we want to keep all of the money we make in football, including gate, TV, bowl revs, etc. Also, we want to share everything evenly in basketball. If you don't capitulate to our demands we're leaving for another conference."
Then the rest of the ACC responds by saying:
"Yeah, that's not going to work for us."
So, FSU and Clemson go to the Big 12 or the SEC and they become stinking rich as a result.
Then 20 some years later some writer who did not live it reads a few self-serving articles and concludes that FSU and Clemson left because they realized that football was king while the rest of the other dummies did not.
That is what happened with Penn State and the rest of the old Eastern Indies.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that would be the revisionist narrative that the FSU and Clemson supporters would push to support their move. However, it wouldn't be any more honest an assessment of what happened than the narrative PSU has pushed for decades. Everyone understands that football drives the bus and always has. North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky and Kansas have never been seen as superpowers on the same level as football juggernauts like Notre Dame, Southern California, Michigan and Alabama. Just look at all the schools who are considered the wealthiest and/or most powerful. It is basically the same list that one could have compiled 10 years ago or 30 years ago and it is overwhelmingly populated by schools whose primary sport is football.
To say that Syracuse and BC just assumed that a then two or three year-old start up would dramatically change a 100-year paradigm is really stretching reason, IMHO. We all knew what was happening and who was holding most of the cards. It's just that some of us had enough gumption to tell the neighborhood bully to take a hike.
PSU left the old neighborhood and has been a
LOT less successful on the field since leaving for the Big Ten. However, in exchange for that reality, they have also become fabulously wealthy so it was probably worth it for them. For Pitt, BC and Syracuse, we ended up in the much better fitting ACC so I think it worked out pretty well for us as well.
Rutgers, a traditional non-factor, was clearly the biggest financial winner in all of this as they ended up in the Big Ten where they will stink every single year but will become very wealthy doing so. On the other end, UConn, Cincinnati, South Florida and Temple are the biggest losers, having been left out of the big leagues altogether with no visible hope of recovering.
Incidentally, I would rank West Virginia as being next on the list of the biggest losers in all of this. At least Pitt gets to stay in its own time zone. Also we get to continue our long-standing series with Syracuse and resume our series with BC, Miami and VT. They get none of that and that will have an absolutely
DEVASTATING impact on their program over the long haul, IMHO.