Lou, I think your assessment of VT is correct if only because not getting VT in 2003 would have seen the Hokies join the SEC along with A&M in 2012. The ACC w/o VT would have forced Swafford to accept deals far less palatable than Louisville and partial ND to ensure conference stability. I'm talking about partial Texas along with TT and either Baylor of TCU, moves that would have fundamentally undermined the ACC.

And one reason VPI hated Louisville was that we annually brutalized them in basketball and we still will in the ACC, also. Football is an even match now.

(10-08-2013 12:41 PM)vandiver49 Wrote:  Lou, I think your assessment of VT is correct if only because not getting VT in 2003 would have seen the Hokies join the SEC along with A&M in 2012. The ACC w/o VT would have forced Swafford to accept deals far less palatable than Louisville and partial ND to ensure conference stability. I'm talking about partial Texas along with TT and either Baylor of TCU, moves that would have fundamentally undermined the ACC.

Exactly, if not much sooner.

But as bad as the ACC was 2003-2013, I'm not sure it would have mattered by 2013. VT carried the league (not that they won national titles or anything) that entire time. They were literally the only team in the ACC that was better than "ok" and was a legitimate top 15.

The ACC without VT would have been much, much more vulnerable by 2013 than they ended up being. It's just a mess to think about, but the ACC would have been sub-sub Big East in that period.

You probably would have had FSU lobbying for the spot in the Big 12 that WVU eventually got.

(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.

(10-08-2013 12:42 PM)Wilkie01 Wrote:  And one reason VPI hated Louisville was that we annually brutalized them in basketball and we still will in the ACC, also. Football ia an even match now.

Come on, man. There's no need to act like a busher with weak smack talk. This is a very respectful, informative discussion on how we all ended up where we are. Don't spoil the broth with nonsense. You're in the big leagues now, it's time to act like it.

Don't get me wrong, you don't have to kiss anyone's ring or anything like that. Also, I'm sure that Louisville has a different perspective on the UofL/VT rivalry than do the VT folks and you are welcome to share that too.

(10-08-2013 11:49 AM)MKPitt Wrote:  I'm not saying it was the wrong move but you have to understand there was a clear hierarchy in the big east. Tier 1 was BC, Syracuse, Pitt, and Miami and Tier 2 was VTech, WVU, Rutgers, and Temple. ND wanted to be aligned with the fiirst group and the ACC found its opening when Miami was looking to move.

Syracuse in particular was not far removed from consistently being in the top 25 and I think most observers would not have thought Virginia Tech was that much better of an add for football than Syracuse at the time because Tech had only been good for about 10 years and that was in the weak Big East. Syracuse had a proven record across all sports and had the institutional profile they were looking for. Obviously things fell off the wagon for Syracuse football but the ACC wouldn't have known that then.

Also, Isaly is spot on about Penn State. Some stuff that's been written about the eastern conference has really been revisionist history.

I would not say Pitt was in a Tier 1 of the conference in the late 90s early 2000s. Too much damage had been done to Pitt football (and even hoops) in the 90s. The reputation of Pitt, athletically, had really flagged. It's facilities were a disaster. The school itself was a mess. Entering Big East football after the 80s, yes, Pitt was in the top tier coming off era of national preeminence and being a historical heavyweight, but the lack of reinvestment in athletics and the reigning in of the athletic department by the university's academics really brought Pitt to the brink of losing out on big time football within a decade...a clear repeat of the 1940s debacle.

But in the 80s, think about what you had in the northeast...PSU won national championships in 82 and 86; Pitt was challenging for them and often number one in the polls; BC had its Flutie years, SU went undefeated in 1987, WVU went undefeated until it lost in the Fiesta Bowl to ND in 1988. Essentially, you had four different northeastern independents legitimately competing for the national championship in the 1980s and this isn't even counting Holtz's Notre Dame teams with its strong northeastern schedule and presence nor Miami. The balance of power was shifted to the northeast in the 80s.

At that time, VT was nothing, not unlike what was thought of Rutgers and Temple, actually probably less. Possibly less than Navy. It had no history and no reputation. The Big East was formed with Miami, Pitt and SU that had history and would be expected carry the conference.

However, the 90s saw Pitt completely tank athletically, while both Syracuse (McNabb years) and VT (Vick years) establish themselves nationally. WVU which was always just a solidly average, built on their first Lambert trophy win in 1988, but sort of fell into a funk in the later Nehland years. BC had the Flutie years, and that was about it. Flash in the pan whose reputation pretty much rests on one hail mary.

When 2002-2003 raid heated up, SU and VT were definitively the top of the heap after Miami. SU was an important target because they were the top all-around athletic department in the northeast at the time, had a somewhat decent profile rivalry with Miami, and as was true up until last year, were a lynch pin member of the Big East conference. The ACC saw the destruction of the Big East as a possibility to fill any remaining vacuum in the northeast and that an extra BCS at-large would be available as the Big East would lose theirs and that the ACC would then have a real shot at two bids with FSU and Miami. The only reason BC was included was because of Donna Shalala. Swapping VT for SU is easy to arm chair quarterback today because of what happened to Syracuse's football program, but it also probably saved the Big East as a viable entity with a BCS bid. It worked out, but the real top tier of football in the conference was Miami, VT, and Syracuse and if those were the teams poached it might have killed the conference. WVU as a true national entity is mostly a post-raid phenomena. Pitt was just starting to reemerge from the 90s around that time and there were still a lot of questions.

(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.

(10-08-2013 01:12 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  

(10-08-2013 11:49 AM)MKPitt Wrote:  I'm not saying it was the wrong move but you have to understand there was a clear hierarchy in the big east. Tier 1 was BC, Syracuse, Pitt, and Miami and Tier 2 was VTech, WVU, Rutgers, and Temple. ND wanted to be aligned with the fiirst group and the ACC found its opening when Miami was looking to move.

Syracuse in particular was not far removed from consistently being in the top 25 and I think most observers would not have thought Virginia Tech was that much better of an add for football than Syracuse at the time because Tech had only been good for about 10 years and that was in the weak Big East. Syracuse had a proven record across all sports and had the institutional profile they were looking for. Obviously things fell off the wagon for Syracuse football but the ACC wouldn't have known that then.

Also, Isaly is spot on about Penn State. Some stuff that's been written about the eastern conference has really been revisionist history.

I would not say Pitt wasn't in a Tier 1 of the conference in the late 90s early 2000s. Too much damage had been done to Pitt football (and even hoops) in the 90s. The reputation of Pitt, athletically, had really flagged. It's facilities were a disaster. The school itself was a mess. Entering Big East football after the 80s, yes, Pitt was in the top tier coming off era of national preeminence and being a historical heavyweight, but the lack of reinvestment in athletics and the reigning in of the athletic department by the university's academics really brought Pitt to the brink of losing out on big time football within a decade...a clear repeat of the 1940s debacle.

But in the 80s, think about what you had in the northeast...PSU won national championships in 82 and 86; Pitt was challenging for them and often number one in the polls; BC had its Flutie years, SU went undefeated in 1987, WVU went undefeated until it lost in the Fiesta Bowl to ND in 1988. Essentially, you had four different northeastern independents legitimately competing for the national championship in the 1980s and this isn't even counting Holtz's Notre Dame teams with its strong northeastern schedule and presence nor Miami. The balance of power was shifted to the northeast in the 80s.

At that time, VT was nothing, not unlike what was thought of Rutgers and Temple, actually probably less. Possibly less than Navy. It had no history and no reputation. The Big East was formed with Miami, Pitt and SU that had history and would be expected carry the conference.

However, the 90s saw Pitt completely tank athletically, while both Syracuse (McNabb years) and VT (Vick years) establish themselves nationally. WVU which was always just a solidly average, built on their first Lambert trophy win in 1988, but sort of fell into a funk in the later Nehland years. BC had the Flutie years, and that was about it. Flash in the pan whose reputation pretty much rests on one hail mary.

When 2002-2003 raid heated up, SU and VT were definitively the top of the heap after Miami. SU was an important target because they were the top all-around athletic department in the northeast at the time, had a somewhat decent profile rivalry with Miami, and as was true up until last year, were a lynch pin member of the Big East conference. The ACC saw the destruction of the Big East as a possibility to fill any remaining vacuum in the northeast and that an extra BCS at-large would be available as the Big East would lose theirs and that the ACC would then have a real shot at two bids with FSU and Miami. The only reason BC was included was because of Donna Shalala. Swapping VT for SU is easy to arm chair quarterback today because of what happened to Syracuse's football program, but it also probably saved the Big East as a viable entity with a BCS bid. It worked out, but the real top tier of football in the conference was Miami, VT, and Syracuse and if those were the teams poached it might have killed the conference. WVU as a true national entity is mostly a post-raid phenomena. Pitt was just starting to reemerge from the 90s around that time and there were still a lot of questions.

I agree with almost everything here I just meant that in terms of prestige and reputation there were two different tiers and for the old timers really it was only Miami, Pitt, and Syracuse. Pitt definitely was the program that struggled the most though on the field. To me it's just like the new big east where no matter how much Cincinnati and Louisville won, the big east still needed its anchor programs (Pitt, Syracuse, and WVU) to win to have any respect as a league. By 2003, Virginia Tech was just getting to that level of respect but Syracuse was considered a big time program then and it wouldn't have been an easy decision. Now, Virginia Tech is clearly on a different level because they sustained their excellence for another decade.

(10-08-2013 12:15 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  However, I think the funniest line of the whole series of articles is how the author states "but in 1994, the [Rutgers Scarlett] Knights had a pretty strong football team". My lord, that is ridiculous revisionist history beyond the pale.

Mostly just reading the thread in a very entertained fashion, but this needed a response. Pretty strong was hyperbolic yes, but the '94 squad wasn't bad. People forget that we were only horrific in the late 90s early 00s. We were just mediocre for most of the history of the program or we were good but against inferior competition.

(10-08-2013 01:12 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  Swapping VT for SU is easy to arm chair quarterback today because of what happened to Syracuse's football program, but it also probably saved the Big East as a viable entity with a BCS bid.

I think Virginia Tech being in the Big East instead of Syracuse would have kept it too. Truth be told, and we don't know hwo this would have played out, the Big East future could have been drastically different had that swap not been made. If you look at the post 2005 BE, it would have been:

Virginia Tech
Pittsburgh
West Virginia
Cincinnati
Louisville
Rutgers
Connecticut
South Florida


Notice how much the center geographically shifts from the Northeast to the Mid-Atlantic. I point this out because this shift combined with the loss of Syracuse likely solidifies the football/basketball school shift. Now note I perfectly understand why that never happened and actually agree with it. But it made it more likely to happen. At that point the conference would have expanded as needed. Villanova now take up the offer to move up like UConn did, and becomes team number nine. Temple is debated as to whether to invite back (based on their issues then probably not). Based on the status of schools in 2004, I would guess the likely candidates would have been three of Temple, Memphis, East Carolina, or TCU. You now have a fairly solid 12 team conference that may have grown into something. The irony is: if that happened, they likely would have re-invited several of the old non-football schools, probably 3 of them, to get ND back in the fold. Likely would have resulted in Georgetown, DePaul, and St. Johns being asked back (with a minority vote less friction).

Not saying the conference would have survived overtures from others, but since the Big East would have had a better chance for long term survival. Especially since that conference would have survived the Big 12 overtures of 2010 that eventually doomed the Big East 3.0.

(10-08-2013 01:26 PM)Dr. Isaly von Yinzer Wrote:  

(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.

The other issuer here is this: In the 80's basketball actually drove revenue moreseo than football. Many today simply cannot comprehend this. This beaars mention because for the most part, the decision for schools like Pitt, Syracuse, and Boston College was to leave very valuable schools like Villanova, St. Johns, Georgetown, and to a lesser extent at the time Seton Hall, to from a league with lesser known schools like Temple, West Virginia, and Rutgers, that was a big gamble at the time That is easy to say now, because we know what will happen over the next 25 years but in terms of revenue, and seeing the possibilities of new TV contracts, you don't leave powerful teams in major markets to sign up with lesser known teams in smaller cities.

Essentially it would be like blaming an investor who in the 1980's invested in MTV, HBO, and the Disney channel when "we all know" he should have invested in Nickelodeon, Turner Broadcasting, and ESPN, because we know what will happen over the next 30 years. The irony of course is that two sets of these now share parent companies.

(10-08-2013 01:33 PM)brista21 Wrote:  

(10-08-2013 12:15 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  However, I think the funniest line of the whole series of articles is how the author states "but in 1994, the [Rutgers Scarlett] Knights had a pretty strong football team". My lord, that is ridiculous revisionist history beyond the pale.

Mostly just reading the thread in a very entertained fashion, but this needed a response. Pretty strong was hyperbolic yes, but the '94 squad wasn't bad. People forget that we were only horrific in the late 90s early 00s. We were just mediocre for most of the history of the program or we were good but against inferior competition.

Yeah, remember this article was from 2004. So the 94 era did look pretty good compared to where they were when this article was written, if not compared to the relative "success" of more recent teams.

(10-08-2013 02:07 PM)Lou_C Wrote:  

(10-08-2013 01:33 PM)brista21 Wrote:  

(10-08-2013 12:15 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  However, I think the funniest line of the whole series of articles is how the author states "but in 1994, the [Rutgers Scarlett] Knights had a pretty strong football team". My lord, that is ridiculous revisionist history beyond the pale.

Mostly just reading the thread in a very entertained fashion, but this needed a response. Pretty strong was hyperbolic yes, but the '94 squad wasn't bad. People forget that we were only horrific in the late 90s early 00s. We were just mediocre for most of the history of the program or we were good but against inferior competition.

Yeah, remember this article was from 2004. So the 94 era did look pretty good compared to where they were when this article was written, if not compared to the relative "success" of more recent teams.

By my definition of mediocre, Rutgers was not a mediocre program for most of its history. Really, not until Schiano turned things around and they started to dump money into football could it claim mediocrity. Most of its history, until the 80s, Rutgers played a 1AA/FCS type of schedule. So bad was their schedule, that in 1976 when Rutgers went 11-0, it got no bowl invite and finished only 17th in the polls.

The 1993 and 1994 Pitt teams were horrid, and they still beat Rutgers for two of their combined six wins. The teams that I saw at Rutgers in those days could hardly be labeled even as "average" as one would typically talk about "average" or "mediocre" programs across the landscape of college football today. Perhaps the 5-5-1 squad was historically one of the better Rutgers teams to that point, but that just tells you had bad the state of that program was back then. I'm not just referencing on the field performance, it was their terrible facilities and, not unimportantly, the bottom line support (if not hostility) of the school to the athletic department. RU could have easily gone the way of Temple (and actually, so could have Pitt).

(10-08-2013 01:41 PM)adcorbett Wrote:  

(10-08-2013 01:12 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  Swapping VT for SU is easy to arm chair quarterback today because of what happened to Syracuse's football program, but it also probably saved the Big East as a viable entity with a BCS bid.

I think Virginia Tech being in the Big East instead of Syracuse would have kept it too. Truth be told, and we don't know hwo this would have played out, the Big East future could have been drastically different had that swap not been made. If you look at the post 2005 BE, it would have been:

Virginia Tech
Pittsburgh
West Virginia
Cincinnati
Louisville
Rutgers
Connecticut
South Florida


Notice how much the center geographically shifts from the Northeast to the Mid-Atlantic. I point this out because this shift combined with the loss of Syracuse likely solidifies the football/basketball school shift. Now note I perfectly understand why that never happened and actually agree with it. But it made it more likely to happen. At that point the conference would have expanded as needed. Villanova now take up the offer to move up like UConn did, and becomes team number nine. Temple is debated as to whether to invite back (based on their issues then probably not). Based on the status of schools in 2004, I would guess the likely candidates would have been three of Temple, Memphis, East Carolina, or TCU. You now have a fairly solid 12 team conference that may have grown into something. The irony is: if that happened, they likely would have re-invited several of the old non-football schools, probably 3 of them, to get ND back in the fold. Likely would have resulted in Georgetown, DePaul, and St. Johns being asked back (with a minority vote less friction).

Not saying the conference would have survived overtures from others, but since the Big East would have had a better chance for long term survival. Especially since that conference would have survived the Big 12 overtures of 2010 that eventually doomed the Big East 3.0.

In this scenario, there is no doubt in my mind that VT ends up in the SEC with TAMU. This would have several other domino effects that would be interesting to speculate about, i.e., where would Mizzou, WVU, UL, Pitt, UConn, Rutgers and Maryland end up if VT was invited to the SEC instead of Mizzou?

Great thread. Couple of other observations. First, if Paterno hadn't been such an arrogant a-hole, he might have worked with Gavitt to create a hybrid Big East at the outset that addressed football and basketball rather than pitting them against each other. Rutgers, for instance, was invited to the original BE ahead of Seton Hall but turned them down to stick with PSU. Also, Temple was given serious consideration before VU was invited. An alternative original Big East could have looked like this:

Penn State
Syracuse
Pitt
BC
Rutgers
Temple
WVU
Providence (hoops only)
Georgetown (hoops only)
St. John's (hoops only)

Second, under any scenario that puts PSU in the Big East, PSU moves to the Big Ten in the early 1990's. The reasons for this move were about academics and, to a lesser extent, money. The reasons would have been just as compelling with PSU in the Big East as out.

Third, I recall that the NCAA implemented a rule around 2000 that required FBS conferences to have 8 football playing members in all sports by 2005. Not saying that the 1999 Miami to the ACC drama didn't play an important role in VT's full invite to the BE, but I had understood that this NCAA rule had prompted the BE to add VT for basketball and UConn for football (UConn had a standing invite, but was asked to make a decision).

(10-08-2013 11:46 AM)Lou_C Wrote:  You can explain the thinking, but you can't polish that turd.

Soooo, this stuff doesn't work?

(10-08-2013 01:26 PM)Dr. Isaly von Yinzer Wrote:  

(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.

To extend your analogy, put yourself in the time frame when this was going down 1979-81. Pitt was just three+ years removed from the national championship and was in the midsts of three straight 11-1 seasons that had them pretty much in the top 5 of the nation the entire stretch and often at #1. Paterno's conference, financially, was a good deal for Pitt, too. Now swap Pitt and PSU for FSU and Clemson, only, Pitt and PSU were more like FSU and Miami on the national stage during the late 90s/early 2000s. Their annual game was often for a national championship. SU and BC would have fell in line with whatever Pitt and PSU decided, and thus the rest of the East, even though the conference was being construed unfairly. So bad was the set up, and so unsavory dealing with Paterno, that Pitt decided not to take a deal that not only would have been favorable to PSU, but really, at the time and in the contemporary context, would have also been very favorable to Pitt. Although none of the other schools wanted it, Pitt was really the school that killed it by deciding to go with the Big East over Paterno in Nov 1981, and in doing so, occurred the wrath of Paterno that only went away with his death. (Hence, an agreement on renewing the series was almost immediately agreed to once he was gone). A league built like that was not going to survive the test of time, unless it survived past Paterno. I believe the history of athletic conferences weighs in pretty clearly on that possibility. It probably would have been a death match between the ACC and this hypothetical Northeast conference. It would have been politically paralyzed to the whims of PSU, and it never would have had the hoops muscle of the Big East had (and the northeast would be fractured as it is now between multiple power conferences). I just don't know if things would have turned out so differently for northeastern football.

(10-08-2013 03:14 PM)orangefan Wrote:  In this scenario, there is no doubt in my mind that VT ends up in the SEC with TAMU. This would have several other domino effects that would be interesting to speculate about, i.e., where would Mizzou, WVU, UL, Pitt, UConn, Rutgers and Maryland end up if VT was invited to the SEC instead of Mizzou?

Great thread. Couple of other observations. First, if Paterno hadn't been such an arrogant a-hole, he might have worked with Gavitt to create a hybrid Big East at the outset that addressed football and basketball rather than pitting them against each other. Rutgers, for instance, was invited to the original BE ahead of Seton Hall but turned them down to stick with PSU. Also, Temple was given serious consideration before VU was invited. An alternative original Big East could have looked like this:

Penn State
Syracuse
Pitt
BC
Rutgers
Temple
WVU
Providence (hoops only)
Georgetown (hoops only)
St. John's (hoops only)

Second, under any scenario that puts PSU in the Big East, PSU moves to the Big Ten in the early 1990's. The reasons for this move were about academics and, to a lesser extent, money. The reasons would have been just as compelling with PSU in the Big East as out.

Third, I recall that the NCAA implemented a rule around 2000 that required FBS conferences to have 8 football playing members in all sports by 2005. Not saying that the 1999 Miami to the ACC drama didn't play an important role in VT's full invite to the BE, but I had understood that this NCAA rule had prompted the BE to add VT for basketball and UConn for football (UConn had a standing invite, but was asked to make a decision).

It's not just that Paterno was an arrogant A*hole, he was, but its not all on that. Dave Gavitt desperately wanted to get PSU into the conferences. It was the basketball only schools that mostly wanted nothing to do with PSU, primarily over their fear of losing direction of the conference to football-centric schools; a theme that paralyzed the Big East from 1979 to 2013. Pitt was forced down their throat as a way to keep SU and BC in the fold, but they weren't really doing back flips over Pitt either. But at least Pitt fit the profile of the other schools better not being a huge land-grant, urban, with average (but not horrible) basketball.

If PSU gets into the Big East, and it forms a football conference, I think it just delays the inevitable to be honest. PSU didn't move to the Big Ten for academics though. It actually hasn't helped them one bit in that regard if you actually look at the real numbers. Their rank of R&D and % of federal $ for R&D is actually less than before they joined the CIC, and their US News rank is worse (well at least up until a month ago when US News changed methodologies). PSU moved to the Big Ten because it needed a major conference. It was turned down by the Big East twice and wasn't able to form its own. It move was about money and security. Academics has essentially zilch to do with these moves.

As far as original Big East members, don't forget that they wanted Holy Cross too, but HC said no.

And the whole UConn moving up thing really sprung as part of the compromise to invite RU and WVU in as full members. All basketball-only schools were given a window of opportunity to have their place in the Big East football conference if they so chose. Georgetown thought about for about 10 minutes and said no. Villanova studied it more seriously and said no. UConn said yes and proceeded to upgrade. That helped harden the conference against Temple, whose ouster was being pushed by Miami, especially now that another cellar dweller, aka UConn, was coming on board. Temple really had and anti-football administration at the time. Temple was given a set of criteria to meet over a multi year period in order to retain membership, one of the most nagging of which was control over home venue dates for football, and it failed to meet almost all of them. Really, at that point, was largely about Temple's administration failure to commit at all to the sport, and it was sort of using the conference ejection as an excuse to drop football.

(10-08-2013 03:55 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  I just don't know if things would have turned out so differently for northeastern football.

Agreed.

(10-08-2013 01:41 PM)adcorbett Wrote:  

(10-08-2013 01:12 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  Swapping VT for SU is easy to arm chair quarterback today because of what happened to Syracuse's football program, but it also probably saved the Big East as a viable entity with a BCS bid.

I think Virginia Tech being in the Big East instead of Syracuse would have kept it too.

I don't think VT had the political clout in the Big East to hold the conference together, whereas the axis of SU-Pitt-WVU did. SU (and ND) were the bridge to the basketball-only schools. Without SU, I believe it would have split along football-basketball lines, which it came within a hair of doing anyway. Why is that important? Administratively, the football schools would have had to form a new NCAA conference, with a new office, a new name, and a new commissioner. Hard to know what happens then. Does the new football conference have a auto BCS bid given to them? Maybe, maybe not. I wouldn't count on it.

Really, one of the only reasons the Big East kept the BCS bid was because of the respect the other BCS commissioners (not named Swofford) had for Mike Tranghese, believe it or not (e.g. including the willingness to change the rules to allow Louisville to count for retaining it, etc...btw, the only conference to vote against that change: the ACC). Whatever you think of him navigating an almost impossible sea of change while being beholden to two very different constituency blocks within his own conference, he was, and is, well liked and respected by his colleagues. That's also evident by him being placed on the football playoff committee.

(10-08-2013 04:17 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  And the whole UConn moving up thing really sprung as part of the compromise to invite RU and WVU in as full members.

Correct. UConn had an invitation regardless of what happened with VT, Temple, or whoever based upon a compromise that was reached when RU and WVU were added for basketball. However, with the NCAA requirement to have 8 all sports members playing football to be an FBS conference, the conference needed UConn to make a decision so it could know whether UConn would count towards the 8.

(10-08-2013 04:35 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote:  Does the new football conference have a auto BCS bid given to them? Maybe, maybe not. I wouldn't count on it.

Therein lies the rub for the Big East football members from 2005 through 2012. We were always on the bubble regarding whether our AQ status would continue. To some extent, the new CFP structure, inclusing the whole Contract Bowl concept, is intended to limit access based on economic power rather than just on the field success, with the goal being to reduce the number of conferences with a golden ticket. The Big East was not well positioned to maintain AQ status, which left it unstable. I do believe that the other conferences would have allowed the BE to maintain its AQ status through at least one more cycle following the initial ACC expansion even if it had been SU that left instead of VT. But the end game was to cut someone out, with the BE being an obvious candidate (the B12 and ACC were also at risk, but navigated the waters better, or maybe just got lucky).