20 years ago, Big East owned March madness
By Malcolm Moran, USA TODAY
Look at the stage. Two coaches, Jim Boeheim of Syracuse and Jim Calhoun of Connecticut, stood together Friday night on the floor of Madison Square Garden, where the Orange and Huskies, the last two national champions, met in a nationally televised Big East Conference semifinal. They each have coached teams to more than 700 victories. They have become finalists for enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Gary McLain holds the trophy after Villanova upset Georgetown in what some regard as the most memorable March madness moment.
1985 Villanova University photo
After a troubling period of contraction and expansion for the Big East, two national championship-caliber programs feature leaders who have become national figures in their sport. The coaches have managed to lift an already imposing conference standard, 20 years after the Big East defined the ultimate achievement in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
When six Big East teams enter the NCAA Tournament that begins Thursday, dominance will be measured by the March weekend in 1985 when Georgetown, Villanova and St. John's qualified for the Final Four. No league had done that before. (Restrictions on having only two teams from the same conference in the field were lifted in 1980.) More impressively, no league has done it since. Feisty Villanova's 66-64 upset of Georgetown in Lexington, Ky., is regarded as one of the most memorable March madness moments.
And the overlooked aspect of the league's perhaps unmatchable accomplishment is how closely the Big East, then in just its sixth season, came to producing a sweep.
"We could have had four," says Lou Carnesecca, then the coach of St. John's. "I mean, four." A banner in the stands at Rupp Arena back then directed a message toward Boston College, which lost by two points to Memphis in a Midwest semifinal. "WHAT HAPPENED?" it read.
Mike Tranghese, now commissioner and then Dave Gavitt's assistant, remembers seeing Gary Williams, then coach of the Eagles, in Lexington. "Gary said to me, 'We're a play away from having all four teams here,' " Tranghese recalls as he sits in his office in Providence. "You were just overwhelmed by what had happened. But with that, the expectations became so out of sorts."
The league continues to meet those expectations, returning to a dominant position the last two seasons. The UConn and Syracuse titles bookend the last two decades with the back-to-back of Georgetown in 1984 and Villanova in 1985. In the intervening 20 years, only the Atlantic Coast Conference won successive national championships: Duke (two) and North Carolina from 1991-93 and Duke and Maryland in 2001-02.
As this tournament begins, the ACC finds itself with lofty expectations, five teams in the field and two — North Carolina and Duke — seeded No. 1 after opening the season with three teams (Wake Forest, UNC and Georgia Tech) ranked in the top four.
Wake Forest is No. 2 and Tech No. 4 in Albuquerque, setting up the possibility of three ACC teams advancing to St. Louis.
Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said the policy of separating conference members until regional championship games gives a collection of teams from a strong league a chance to advance.
"I don't think it's a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence," Delany said of the Big East's 1985 performance. "I think it's a once-in-20-year occurrence. I think it will happen again someday."
He cited two Final Fours that included multiple Big Ten teams, including one that defeated another league school in a regional final. In 2000, Wisconsin defeated Purdue to join Michigan State in the Final Four. In 1992, Michigan defeated Ohio State in the final eight to join Indiana in the national semifinals. The Big 12 has had two recent chances. In 2003, Kansas and Texas reached the Final Four, and Oklahoma lost in a regional final to eventual champion Syracuse. In 2002, Oklahoma beat Missouri in the final eight to join Kansas in the Final Four.
The new face of college hoops
Look at the faces. So many of them, and so young, packed into a small space on the 7th Avenue side outside Madison Square Garden. The Big East is preparing for the 1982-83 season, with its fourth tournament shifting to New York, and this is the generation that made that step possible. In the foreground is Gavitt, the former Providence coach whose persuasiveness created a tightly knit collection of what had been loosely gathered schools in the Northeast.
In the back is the angular face of Georgetown sophomore Patrick Ewing, who had already led the Hoyas to the national title game. There is John Thompson, the coach who within a decade led the Hoyas from the bottom of Division I to a national final. There is Chris Mullin of St. John's under his moptop, and a smiling Carnesecca, Mullin's coach, in a brown leather coat.
The message board above the street proclaims: "The Big East and Dave Gavitt are making it big in the big time."
Two years later, they would make it big in the biggest way. Villanova, which had lost by just two points and seven points to Georgetown in the regular season, shot its way to the national title behind Ed Pinckney and Harold Jensen. The team hit 22 of 28 field goals, making a celebrity of coach Rollie Massimino and stopping the Georgetown machine of Ewing and Thompson.
The conference had indeed become a national power. Providence and Syracuse would reach the Final Four in 1987, Seton Hall in 1989. Within just five tournaments, six different league schools reached college basketball's version of mecca. The closest any league has come to that run was the Big Ten, which had five different schools in six years from 1997-2002.
A league comes together
In March 1982, Gavitt was having dinner in a Raleigh, N.C., steakhouse with North Carolina coach Dean Smith and his wife. Two regional finals had been completed with two to come on Sunday. Of the six remaining teams that Saturday night, three were from this 3-year-old conference.
Gavitt glowed that night as he described the chants of "Big East ... Big East" heard at another site as the NCAA Tournament created strange bedfellows. Georgetown fans rooting for Boston College? BC pulling for Villanova? Villanova and Boston College would lose the next day, but conference unity had spread to a once-fragmented fan base.
Look at the problems. The economic and political pressures of football necessitated expansion and the establishment of a football league. The communal effort of the original schools had been invaded by others interested in sharing riches. In the first 10 years six members reached the Final Four, and once-lowly Seton Hall —Seton Hall— had come within a touch foul of a national title. In 1991, Tranghese's first year as commissioner, seven of the nine league members earned NCAA bids. Recruiting had gone from regional to national to global.
"I had thought (a conference) would make it harder for teams to come into the East and take players out," Gavitt remembers.
"But I never, ever imagined the success the Georgetowns and Connecticuts and Syracuses of the world would have recruiting kids from California and Louisiana and South Carolina and Illinois."
But the continued existence of the league was preserved in 1994 only after a series of difficult meetings. Syracuse's unexpected trip to the 1996 title game marked the conference's first Final Four berth in seven years. Then in 1997, after a conference tournament loss before the first non-sellout quarterfinal session in 15 years, divisive remarks by West Virginia coach Gale Catlett drew attention to the problems of a 13-team league.
In a postgame news conference, Catlett campaigned — unsuccessfully — for an NCAA spot while criticizing the credentials of Providence and Georgetown, teams that would earn two of the four Big East bids. The display came to represent a unity that had been lost. "Once you go beyond 10, the conference ceases to be a conference," Gavitt says. "It becomes an association, and you end up losing some of that."
Bigger, yes. But better?
Look at the future. Tranghese stood at a board during a conference meeting last summer and wrote the schools that will form the league this fall when Boston College departs and Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville, Marquette and South Florida arrive. Twelve of the 16 teams would qualify for the conference tournament.
"I said, 'Based on what we saw this year, let me write down where people would fit had we played a schedule,' " Tranghese remembers. The room grew silent as coaches and athletic directors saw teams with winning records that would not have been in New York.
"For the fans, it's a bonanza," Carnesecca says. "For the coaches, it's a disaster."
There will be issues of compatibility, scheduling, officiating and camaraderie. There is the unknown direction of the I-A football programs. Retired Syracuse athletics director Jake Crouthamel feels the discussions of the past two years have created an orderly future. "We should not find ourselves in five years in the position we found ourselves in (last) year, because we didn't plan 25 years ago for 25 years ahead," he says. "We've laid out a plan of what-ifs, and so I think whichever what-if comes up, we're going to be so much better prepared to deal with it."
Tranghese, the administrative link to the beginning, will direct a league more than twice the size of the original. "The thing I'm just trying to get a lot of people to understand is that we're on an historic trek," he says. "We can do this one of two ways. We can all get on the same bandwagon and promote the heck out of this thing, or we can fuss."
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Article: great past, questionable future for BE
