(09-24-2020 04:17 AM)CliftonAve Wrote:  

(09-23-2020 10:35 PM)Nerdlinger Wrote:  

(09-23-2020 09:17 PM)RUScarlets Wrote:  

(09-23-2020 09:52 AM)DFW HOYA Wrote:  16 is too many, the ACC knows that. They've scuttled a powerful brand for taking ESPN's bait to split up the Big East to save them money.

A 12 team ACC (so long to BC, Pitt, and post-Boeheim Syracuse) would be a powerful combination.

Big East Football was greater than the sum of its parts because of the rivalries and the media focus. If you just kept the North East monopoly, you could have let Miami go and all the schools would have been better off collectively. Now, some schools are winners and others are losers. That's Darwinism I suppose, but even a football conference with:

South: Pitt, WVU, UC, UL, USF, UCF
North: RU, UConn, BC, Cuse, Navy (FB only), Temple

That conference would have never lost P6 status in football let alone BBall. Now half those schools are set years back while the others sold out to greed (and obscurity in most cases). ESPN sadly didn't want to shell out two separate contracts and tried to cut costs, diluting the product overall.

It's questionable that a conference like that would have maintained power status in football into the CFP era. And in any case, they lack a monopoly on the Northeast without the strongest school, Penn State.

Under the metrics of the BCS system that conference would still be an automatic qualifier. Had that conference remained, I don’t think the schools would have the authority to blow up the BCS system.

RU is right though, there were some great rivalries there. Obviously you had WVU/Pitt, UC/UL, WVU/UL, UC/Pitt, SU/UConn, SU/Rutgers, UConn/Rutgers.. the first two were much more established that the later but I think those other series were starting to perculate over the years.

IMO, looking at the Big East of 2005 - 2011 and the AAC of today is instructive in terms of the importance of being comfortable in your conference. Because the Big East was an AQ conference, schools were glad to be there, and that facilitated the gelling of rivalries that you and RU mention here. It was a tight-knit group that pulled together in an "us against the world" kind of way, because there was something to pull together around - that AQ/BCS golden ticket.

In contrast, the current AAC has the ingredients for that, but it doesn't have the same unified feel, because nobody views it as their destination conference. Each school has its own agenda on how to get to a "P" league, so there's always a sense of isolation. Yes, individual AAC games can be very good, there are many good AAC games every year. But they all feel like one-shot affairs, there isn't that sense that they are part of an overarching whole like games were in the Big East. And that just takes something away from the experience. It's kind of like when you are watching the SEC and it's Auburn vs LSU, yes, the game is great on its own terms, but it matters even more because you think of how it "fits in" with what other games are going on and how it all impacts the SEC race, etc.

You had that with the 2005 - 2012 Big East, but not the current AAC.