(11-04-2011 10:15 PM)Lolly Popp Wrote:  Melky, your posts are coming off as very bitter and condescending, which may not be your intention.

Bitter? Moi?

What you may be detecting is a frustration & even some anger over the repeated attacks on the Big East, the basketball schools in particular which included UConn for a long time.

Two factors play into my frustration:

1. The attacks are usually unsupportable by the facts.
2. Fans of the traditional eastern football powers normally fail to take any responsibility for what evolved over the years despite the facts clearly pointing to it being their problem & no one else's. The accusation that the football schools have somehow been victimized by the basketball schools is beyond laughable. If that's condescending, I'm sorry, but playing the victim card is just silly & is made worse when the facts are ignored.

(11-04-2011 10:41 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  A couple of further points:

(1) The hybrid in and of itself didn't cause instability. The Big 12 has always been an all-sports league and it also got completely poached. So, just because you're an all-sports league doesn't mean tht you get stability. What the Big East and Big 12 have in common is that they have been marriages of TV convenience from the very beginning. Both conferences were explicitly created for TV purposes (major Northeastern basketball markets for the Big East, combining the old Big 8 with the Texas market for the Big 12) and even when looking at their respective expansions/replacements the past few weeks, there really isn't any bond beyond a TV arrangement. While expansion for the Big Ten, Pac-12, ACC and SEC all certainly had TV interests very high on the list, there are still bonds that go beyond solely money (academics, cultural fit, etc.). If you're only in a league for money, then it's easy to ditch that league when another one offers more money. If you're in a league where you have other intertwined interests (i.e. the CIC with the Big Ten), then it's much harder to leave just for football money.

(2) As others have stated, the fact that Penn State was never in the Big East meant that the football conference was going to be vulnerable from day one. While there has been a lot of debate here about who was to "blame" for PSU not ending up in the Big East (and frankly, I believe they would've ended up in the Big Ten, anyway, as the academic factor cannot be overstated), it's clear that a league claiming to be a Northeastern conference would have a limit in terms of traction without the most popular Northeastern school.

(3) For the aforementioned reasons, there's only so much the Big East leaders could've done over the years. That's not to say that they didn't make poor choices at times (as they definitely did), but absolutely nothing would've stopped Miami from going to the ACC. That was the school's "goal" conference and they were going to jump at an invite from them no matter what. Once that occurred, any Big East school going forward was going to take an ACC invite immediately, as well. Adding more football schools after 2003 would never have stopped Syracuse, Pitt and WVU from leaving this year.

Frankly, it's amazing that the Big East has survived up to this point. It has been (and will continue to be) completely poachable by the other 5 AQ conferences and nothing is going to change that. However, the Big East can continue to survive by reinventing itself as it will be in a position to grab the top non-AQ programs later on even with further defections occur.

Frank, stop! Please. I'm begging you. You're making far too much sense.

(11-04-2011 08:40 PM)Melky Cabrera Wrote:  Syracuse, BC, & eventually Pitt decided that basketball was more important to them at the time. They were all going in different directions & they have been ever since.

I agree with your comments about 1994. Eastern Football had many opportunities like this to form an all sports conference without the Catholics over the past 30 years & they always rejected the idea. Their inability to commit to each other is precisely what has always been the core problem.

Just because SU and BC refused to accept Paterno's financial terms doesn't mean that we had prioritized basketball.

Don't presume to know what SU and BC's motivations were in 1982 ... you weren't there.

Hindsight is 20/20. Maybe the football schools should have taken the CBS money in 1994 and left the 1AA's behind. BC, SU, Pitt, WV, Temple, Rutgers, Va Tech, Miami, maybe Cinci and Louisville and two more flavors of the month could have made for a decent conference ... at least until the ACC came calling with the promise of more TV money and exposure.

Ironically, UConn would have been one of the schools left behind, along with Providence, Seton Hall, St Johns, Villanova, and Georgetown. Without the "express pass to the Big East", UConn would still be playing football in the A-10 or the CAA.

Judging by the tone of most of your posts, that sounds like what you would have preferred. At least you wouldn't be able to blame the football schools for all your problems anymore.

(11-05-2011 05:30 AM)KnightLight Wrote:  Finally...[b]the Big East leadership (and mostly their Catholic Hoop schools) wasted a YEAR trying to get this Div I-AA Football program invited to join their BCS Football Conf.

I dare you to show me a single legitimate news source to support this allegation. By all reports when the Villanova report first surfaced, the idea came from the football side.

As for the Big East "leadership" (assuming you mean the commissioner), he simply works on the agenda that the decision makers (conference members) have set for him to implement. That's his job. If he pursued some agenda in opposition to what the membership wanted, he'd be out of a job.

(11-04-2011 10:15 PM)Lolly Popp Wrote:  Melky, your posts are coming off as very bitter and condescending, which may not be your intention. First of all, the idea of an Eastern Conference had been floated several times in the 1970s, by several people besides Paterno. But it never happened because no one could see what would happen in the future. As far as the Temple or Villanova invite, there is definitely some fire to that smoke, since Villanova could not clear their schedule to play in the Big East the first year. That means, as I have been told by very reputable people, that they did indeed get the invitation late in the process of forming the Big East.

As far as 1982, sure Penn State had a bad basketball program, and their team would not have helped a snobby urban conference at that time. Nonetheless, 5/8 of the Big East still wanted Penn State to join, and three Catholic basketball schools kept them out. This is an issue of not having vision. Gavitt wanted Penn State in the Big East and fought hard to sway everyone to vote yes. He knew that large state schools were going to be the wave of the future. The people casting votes that day only had shortsighted issues and personality clashes on their minds. Crouthamel himself says the outcome was a mistake.

What many people feel is that, if Penn State had been admitted to the Big East in 1982, it would have eventually morphed from a basketball conference into an all-sports league on its own. Even if Jordan wanted to move Penn State to the Big Ten, the fact that they were in the Big East rather than the A-10, could have bought Paterno some extra time to convince the Big East to add football. Big East basketball was all the rage in the 1980s and there is no doubt Penn State would have benefitted from the association, even if the school's own team was constantly getting their butts kicked all over the hardwood.

This would have then meant that, when Notre Dame signed their blockbuster NBC contract, Florida State joined the ACC, and Arkansas and South Carolina joined the SEC, the Big East schools would have realized which way the winds were blowing, and got together for football on their own accord. BC, Syracuse, Penn State, and Pitt would have been able to convince UConn, Providence, St. John's, Seton Hall, Villanova, and Georgetown that Rutgers, Temple, West Virginia, and Virginia Tech needed full membership when the time came. Miami and Notre Dame probably would have never been invited at all.

Perhaps it wouldn't have played out that way in real life, but no one knows, just as you don't know 100% that Penn State would have left the Big East for the Big Ten if they had gotten voted in. This is all speculation and no one has a monopoly on it. At the end of the day, Eastern football has always been terribly fractured due to selfishness, stupidity, and shortsightedness. This remains true today on both the FBS and FCS levels. There is no excuse for no one ever realizing what schools in the South saw, which is that football conferences full of big public universities would be the wave of the future.

Lolly Popp, I have a problem with your basic premise that the path to an eastern all sports conference had to be through the Big East. The Big East was a basketball conference with 6 of 8 members playing no football. Many people feel as you do, but the idea that a conference of schools that don't play football is the base on which to build an all sports conference doesn't make any sense to me. It's the hybrid all over again & many people believe that it is the very hybrid nature of the conference that is the root cause of all its other problems.

When Jordan arrived at Penn State, the most that PSU could have had was a one year involvement with the Big East even if they had been accepted in 1982. That's not enough time to have built up rivalries or anything else that would have deterred him from from his commitment to a Big Ten future. In the eastern state schools, he didn't see enough with commonality of mission & purpose with Penn State. He did see that commonality in the Big Ten schools. As an academician, he saw the CIC & the vast opportunities for research dollars that would bring. Any athletic conference can't hold a candle to that. It's not even debatable that as long as the Big Ten were willing, Penn State was going there.

The Big East could never have morphed into an all sports conference because too many members would never have adopted football. It's a flawed. Paterno never saw the Big East as a vehicle to an all sports conference. He correctly saw that conference emerging from an affiliation among the football schools. He also came to see that there was no way that would work among the candidates he had before him. So, he moved on. Suggesting that there was an opportunity for such a thing in the Big East is wishful thinking & revisionist history. Don't mean to sound condescending, but you can't make something out of facts that don't support it. The path to an all sports conference was through the all sports schools, not through a group of non-football schools. There is simply no way to get around that basic. What Paterno learned is what we have seen ever since. There is not enough among the Big East football schools to hold them together, which is why they are now scattered all over the map.

(11-05-2011 08:50 AM)OrangeXtreme Wrote:  

(11-04-2011 08:40 PM)Melky Cabrera Wrote:  Syracuse, BC, & eventually Pitt decided that basketball was more important to them at the time. They were all going in different directions & they have been ever since.

I agree with your comments about 1994. Eastern Football had many opportunities like this to form an all sports conference without the Catholics over the past 30 years & they always rejected the idea. Their inability to commit to each other is precisely what has always been the core problem.

Just because SU and BC refused to accept Paterno's financial terms doesn't mean that we had prioritized basketball.

Don't presume to know what SU and BC's motivations were in 1982 ... you weren't there.

Hindsight is 20/20. Maybe the football schools should have taken the CBS money in 1994 and left the 1AA's behind. BC, SU, Pitt, WV, Temple, Rutgers, Va Tech, Miami, maybe Cinci and Louisville and two more flavors of the month could have made for a decent conference ... at least until the ACC came calling with the promise of more TV money and exposure.

Ironically, UConn would have been one of the schools left behind, along with Providence, Seton Hall, St Johns, Villanova, and Georgetown. Without the "express pass to the Big East", UConn would still be playing football in the A-10 or the CAA.

Judging by the tone of most of your posts, that sounds like what you would have preferred. At least you wouldn't be able to blame the football schools for all your problems anymore.

Orange Xtreme, what problems of mine have I ever blamed on the football schools? I just became tired at a certain point of reading poster after poster blaming the problems of the football schools on everyone else but themselves. It's simply childish & factually incorrect. Sorry if that bothers you.

In regard to whether Syracuse & BC prioritized basketball, I said that "basketball was more important to them at the time" - meaning more important than joining an all sports conference. That's not my opinion, it's what is reported by Jake Crouthamel in his memoir/Big East history:

"While our football fortunes would have been well served through such an alignment, it would have been a step backward for men's basketball. To enter such an alignment Syracuse and BC would have had to leave the Big East. With the reluctance of BC and Syracuse to do so, Penn State than asked for membership in the Big East."

So Syracuse, according to Crouthamel, was not willing to give up the basketball benefits of the Big East in order to join an all sports affiliation. The risk in their assessment was simply to great & was not outweighed by any anticipated benefits at the time.

Here's the link to the full text of Crouthamel's memoir:

http://www.suathletics.com/sports/2001/8/8/history.aspx

It's just a matter of conference pecking order this is very, very hard to alter. The ACC raid of the Big East cemented what was already probably true that in terms of conference strength (not football strength, but a combination of brand name, cohesion, fit, etc) the Big East was #6. Nothing the Big East could have done since then was going to change that so it was inevitable that if the other 5 conferences came knocking, the Big East was going to lose members.

This isn't to say expansion would have been the right move earlier either though. It was a risk not too, but it also would have been a risk to do so. If Texas A&M hadn't decided to go to the SEC, each Big East team would have had at least a 1/9 chance of making a BCS bowl each year, and would be on the verge of a much improved contract.

It's a shame that your only knowledge of Big East history comes from a website, and you discount the knowledge and recollections of the people who lived through it. Read some more books: Big Hoops, by Bill Reynolds; and Basketball Warfare, by Kevin McNamara. Maybe some day you'll know enough about BE history to carry on an informed discussion. Or, you could simply ask the people who are old enough to remember what happened.

Had the football schools left the BE in 1982, or 1989, or 1994, where would UConn be now? You'd be a 1-AA school in a mid-major basketball conference.The only reason UConn has 3 titles and a BCS level program is because of the decisions that other football schools made over the past 30 years.

The same schools that you continually blame for the demise of the Big East.

The basketball schools aren't completely blamless in this soap opera, but it's pointless to argue with you any further. If you don't like what you're being told, you'll just dismiss it as being "facturally incorrect".

Are all UConn fans like you ... sympathetic to the Catholic hoops schools? I guess UConn still thinks of itself as a basketball school first. Might explain why the ACC didn't consider sending you an invite; they wanted "football thinking" schools only.

Maybe I'm not following the thread well enough, but wasn't the reason the eastern conference failed because PSU wanted to share basketball revenue and not football? Coming from a football school, that would be one s****y deal.

(11-05-2011 06:03 PM)Jeepers44 Wrote:  Maybe I'm not following the thread well enough, but wasn't the reason the eastern conference failed because PSU wanted to share basketball revenue and not football? Coming from a football school, that would be one s****y deal.

Bingo. Paterno wanted all the schools to share ticket and post-season revenue for all sports but football.

From SU's viewpoint, we would have to give JoePa a share of the gate everytime we sold 20,000 basketball tickets, but SU would never see a dime when PSU sold 100,000 football tickets.

Imagine 8 people renting a house at the shore for the summer. JoePa wants to live rent free, while the rent and living expenses are split 7 ways.

Great deal for PSU, Not so great for the rest of us.

(11-05-2011 05:37 PM)OrangeXtreme Wrote:  It's a shame that your only knowledge of Big East history comes from a website, and you discount the knowledge and recollections of the people who lived through it. Read some more books: Big Hoops, by Bill Reynolds; and Basketball Warfare, by Kevin McNamara. Maybe some day you'll know enough about BE history to carry on an informed discussion. Or, you could simply ask the people who are old enough to remember what happened.

Had the football schools left the BE in 1982, or 1989, or 1994, where would UConn be now? You'd be a 1-AA school in a mid-major basketball conference.The only reason UConn has 3 titles and a BCS level program is because of the decisions that other football schools made over the past 30 years.

The same schools that you continually blame for the demise of the Big East.

The basketball schools aren't completely blamless in this soap opera, but it's pointless to argue with you any further. If you don't like what you're being told, you'll just dismiss it as being "facturally incorrect".

Are all UConn fans like you ... sympathetic to the Catholic hoops schools? I guess UConn still thinks of itself as a basketball school first. Might explain why the ACC didn't consider sending you an invite; they wanted "football thinking" schools only.

Gee whiz, what's got you on your high horse? I'm just exchanging ideas.

I actually have lived through Big History . . . and more. Sorry that your knowledge only comes from books. I used Crouthamel as an objective link to support what I already knew. It would be nice if you would quote something from one of these books to support whatever point you're trying to make instead of just dropping names.

I'm quite aware that UConn has been very fortunate to have ended up where we are. Thanks for pointing that out. But I certainly am not going to credit football schools for our 3 BB titles. It was basketball schools who built the Big East & helped launch UConn's run over the past 2 deaces with little help from any football schools other than Syracuse.

It's not so much that I'm sympathetic to the Catholic schools as I'm tired of football schools playing the blame game & failing to take responsibility for where they are. Their fate has always been in their own hands, yet so many fans seem to need to play the victim card & say it's somebody else's fault. That kind of attitude only leads to further victimization.

As for UConn & the ACC, the ACC by all reports did consider UConn. Since the ACC is a basketball-first conference, I hardly think that they cared about schools that were "football thinking." If they had, they obviously wouldn't have picked Syracuse's failed football program & would have taken West Virginia instead.

Why don't you stop being personally offended by honest discussion. I've offered a perspective on the dynamics within the Big East conference which goes virtually ignored here as everyone blames the BB schools, ND, the commissioner, ESPN, etc. Even if I'm wrong, it's worth exploring ideas that are different for what they do have to offer instead of reinforcing the same old rehashed tripe.

(11-05-2011 06:33 PM)OrangeXtreme Wrote:  

(11-05-2011 06:03 PM)Jeepers44 Wrote:  Maybe I'm not following the thread well enough, but wasn't the reason the eastern conference failed because PSU wanted to share basketball revenue and not football? Coming from a football school, that would be one s****y deal.

Bingo. Paterno wanted all the schools to share ticket and post-season revenue for all sports but football.

From SU's viewpoint, we would have to give JoePa a share of the gate everytime we sold 20,000 basketball tickets, but SU would never see a dime when PSU sold 100,000 football tickets.

Imagine 8 people renting a house at the shore for the summer. JoePa wants to live rent free, while the rent and living expenses are split 7 ways.

Great deal for PSU, Not so great for the rest of us.

That doesn't explain why the other football schools didn't come together outside the Big East for an all sports conference. In the long run, they proceeded without Penn State anyway. And in the long run, Penn State was never going to stay with those schools. So despite its prominence in the region, they are essentially irrelevant to the history of an all sports conference in the Big East.

The biggest mistake was for the football schools to put their fate in the hands of a basketball conference. I don't see how that can be disputed. There are innumerable posts here complaining about the hybrid, the Catholic schools, etc. So, doesn't it make sense to consider that none of this ever would have happened if they had simply formed their own conference at any one of the key points in their history when they easily could have done so?

(11-04-2011 08:05 PM)Lolly Popp Wrote:  A huge opportunity was also missed in 1994. CBS offered the football schools a contract to break away, form their own all-sports league, and expand. Instead, they compromised by adding Rutgers and West Virginia for all sports, plus Notre Dame in everything but football. Temple and Virginia Tech got screwed, although the Hokies did eventually get basketball membership, shortly before leaving.

Sounds like the biggest mistake of all was made by the football schools in 1994.

(11-05-2011 11:43 PM)Melky Cabrera Wrote:  The biggest mistake was for the football schools to put their fate in the hands of a basketball conference. I don't see how that can be disputed. There are innumerable posts here complaining about the hybrid, the Catholic schools, etc. So, doesn't it make sense to consider that none of this ever would have happened if they had simply formed their own conference at any one of the key points in their history when they easily could have done so?

So very true.

As a Tulane fan, I can't help but think back to the proposed, so-called "Raycom League" of 1990. How different the last 20 years of college football would have been if that had become a reality. And it didn't involve Penn State, either.