Sometimes, I really just don’t understand sports media. Particularly when it comes to college sports. I guess sometimes they need things to write about, but even when they write about frivolous things, they write about unlikely ones. Over the past few months, there has been a lot of talk about the Big East Conference being “on life support” or similarly dire terms. Now, competitively, the Big East will be a far cry from what it was the last several seasons (in my opinion, the most under-rated football conference in the country). But there is almost no reason why we should think it even a possibility that the Big East disbands and the schools slated to join the conference scramble for a home or come back from whence they came.
To recap: TCU left before it ever actually joined. West Virginia has left. Louisville, Pitt, Syracuse, and Rutgers are leaving. The eight Catholic non-football schools are leaving. That leaves only Cincinnati, Connecticut, and South Florida as continuous members along with Temple, who joined this past season*. SMU, Houston, Memphis, Tulane, East Carolina**, and Central Florida are slated to join. Boise State*** was slated to join, but has decided to remain in the Mountain West Conference. In the coming weeks, San Diego State*** is likely to make the same decision. Navy*** is also supposed to join in a few years, but I’d be surprised if Navy didn’t reconsider as well.
If you can follow that, it paints a pretty sour picture. Granted, Cincinnati and Connecticut are very competitive within the conference (and also, basketball!). But there is a decent chance they will be leaving, too. That would leave the mediocre South Florida as the sole continuous member of the conference. For the sake of this post, let’s assume that happens (because if it doesn’t my skepticism towards the non-viability of the Big East becomes much, much more warranted).
So that would leave SMU, Houston, Tulane, Memphis, East Carolina, Central Florida, South Florida, and Temple. With the exception of the first two, there is little talk of those schools being invited to a better conference. in the case of Houston and SMU, there has been loose talk about them joining Boise State and San Diego State in the Mountain West Conference. This is unlikely but represents one of the few genuine threats to the conference’s viability.
People look at these eight teams and think how much worse it is than the Big East has historically been. That’s why they use terms like “life support.” However, for the constituent schools, with the possible Houston/SMU exception, it represents the best conference they can join and a better conference than the one they left. There were five top performing schools in Conference USA – their present league – and three of them are a part of the package. Tulsa, number four, would absolutely accept an invitation to the Big East tomorrow if issued an invite. The situation for Southern Miss (#5) is more complicated. Because of their weak financial position, they might not be able to afford it.
Meanwhile, they are leaving behind a lot of excess baggage. And with the possible exception of Southern Miss, anybody they don’t want to leave behind can be invited at a moment’s notice.
Conference USA, the place where most of the teams would return to (all but Temple are former members), is simply not an attractive option. Houston and SMU have been replaced by North Texas and UTSA. Central Florida has been replaced by Florida International and Florida Atlantic. Because of this, a return would mean conference congestion in Texas (six teams) and Florida (four). As a general rule, schools don’t want too much in-state rivalry because they want to separate themselves in terms of recruiting and prestige. SMU doesn’t want to play sibling to North Texas. South Florida doesn’t want to play sibling to Florida Atlantic. So these schools will move heaven and earth not to resign themselves to that fate.
I would say that even if Houston and SMU were to go west, and even if they took Tulsa and another school out of consideration for the Big East, they’d still stick together rather than scramble to get back into their old conference. Replace Houston and SMU with some combination of Rice, North Texas, and UTSA and keep on trucking. The only reservation I have about this is East Carolina. They still haven’t issued ECU (the only school in the lot to bring more than 50,000 fans to each football game, as well as one of the best schools in the present Conference USA) an all-sports invitation. And Conference USA went out of their way to bring in schools that ECU wanted (bucking the general rule, East Carolina actually wanted teams in closer proximity and that’s what they got). If they were to high-tail it back to Conference USA, that would bode ill.
But that’s unlikely, if the members keep a level head, for two reasons. First, because it continues to represent an opportunity to “clean house” and end up with a conference that replaces the two least desirable members of Conference USA with Temple and South Florida. Second, because they are sitting on a huge pile of cash. With the exception of seven of the eight Catholic schools and San Diego State, every departing member is paying an exit fee and they are substantial. If pressed, they can buy Southern Miss’s admission into the conference with that money. And it gives them enough money to set up camp and relax about the present lack of a TV contract.
Now, I’d be remiss if I did not mention the two scenarios in which I could be wrong.
First, if Cincinnati and Connecticut get ACC invites, it’s possible that they have a window where they can turn off the lights on their way out. It takes 2/3 of the conference to vote for dissolution and that represents two of the three current all-sport members (South Florida). However, Temple is a member as well and it’s unclear whether or not they have a vote. There is also a good chance that they can be persuaded not to kill the conference with a carrot (“we’ll waive the exit fee for you two”) and stick (“We will go to court over this”). Given that the incoming teams joined the conference in good faith and are materially harmed by dissolution, it would strike me as unlikely that they would have no case in the event that the conference is needlessly killed.
Second, if the ACC gets absolutely plundered. If the Big 12 goes to 18, for instance (two divisions of 9 with a majority of the ACC), of some combination of Big 12, Big Ten, and SEC pilfering of the ACC to a total number of more than four schools. If the ACC loses both Florida schools, then South Florida and Central Florida are in play. That, in turn, would make the conference substantially less appealing to several members. Possibly to the point that it’s less appealing than returning to Conference USA or heading west would be. If the ACC loses eight, then you are likely to see a near-merger between the ACC and Big East, with less than a handful of schools remaining and very little leverage to tempt anyone away from Conference USA. But this would require more than just the Big Ten and SEC going to 16. If they lose four, the ACC can rebound with just two in order to get back to 12. So both of those would have to happen and the Big 12 would need to expand into the region.
A lot of people are rooting for the Big East’s demise and have been for some time. The conceptually problematic additions of Boise State and San Diego State (and to a lesser extent Houston and SMU, and TCU before those two) only added to the whiff of desperation of something that must be critically ill in some way or another. But with Boise State and San Diego State gone, the geographic blueprint is no larger than that of the old Conference USA and is smaller than that of the Mountain West Conference. And, as underwhelming as the conference looks compared to how it looked a year or two ago, it’s still better than the alternative for most of its constituent schools.
* – Temple is presently only a football member, but all sports will be joining starting next season.
** – East Carolina is presently slated to join as football-only, but a full-sport invitation may be in its future.
*** – Navy, Boise State, and San Diego State were/are slated to join as football-only.
USM is about a million in debt thats true, however in your scenario with Uconn gone travel would be pretty much the same as in C-USA and would have much better competition, putting the Eagles back with most of its rivals. I just dont see any reason why they would be unable to financially support this schedule when they already have to make trips to El Paso and soon Miami. Throw in the rumor that the next expansion will bring in New Mexico and it sure seems like current C-USA will soon be more expensive the Big East. If your using something else to gage the financial drawback then I’d love to hear it.
Outside of that I think your article is spot on, theres no doubt that the Big East is fighting with the Mountain West for title of best of the rest, but its very unlikely that it will disintegrate all together unless something major changes, though it is possible that the Basketball schools will take the name and leave the Football schools to form a new brand. That might actually be the best thing for everyone, but either way I don’t see the conference disbanding and going back to play with their little brothers who C-USA just picked up.
Hello Mike,
The main reason I pick on USM is that I have been told that they might simply not be able to get access to the $6m they would need to leave C*USA (this almost prevented UCF from joining the BE). If they can, it’s money well spent, in my view. Leaving aside travel costs, I expect the BE’s TV contract to be at least a million more per team per year than C*USA’s.
And even if USM doesn’t have access to the money, I think the conference should help them out. Last season aside, I’d consider USM to be integral to keep conference competitiveness afloat. I just don’t know how it will shake out.
I think it would be best if the football schools did cede the “Big East” name. I think the basketball schools have a stronger moral claim to it. Legally, though, I don’t think they have any claim to it and I think it’s probably too valuable for the football schools to give up willingly. We’ll see, though.
Did you mean New Mexico or New Mexico State? I’ve heard rumors of the latter, but not the former. I’m sure the conference would prefer the Lobos, but I don’t see UNM making the leap. NMSU is probably the best of the available schools for C*USA (their team is… struggling… but they have AggieVision, are a land grant school, and are a step towards preventing Sun Belt teams from overwhelming the league), if and when they have more slots to fill. Western Kentucky, the other school I hear mentioned, is less inspiring (Petrino helps, but how long is he going to be there?). But I don’t know who else there is for them to get. Louisiana is the only other one that really comes to mind.
It’s kind of funny that after the Big East picks its next two teams, there’ll be more present C*USA schools in the Big East than in C*USA, and more present Sun Belt schools in C*USA than C*USA schools. This assumes that things don’t take a twist towards the unexpected (Big East raiding the MAC, for example).
Many of the people I know, all of whom are fans, consider the Big East to be “dying” or “dead” because its cultural identity is gone. The original schools were almost all urban schools and played a distinct brand of northeast, urban basketball (city ball, for lack of a better word). It is what made, for my money, the Big East Tournament the best Conference Tournament of the bunch; plus it didn’t hurt that they played it at MSG. Some of the new schools had a similar culture or at least similar style of play… Louisville, Cinci, Marquette all more-or-less worked within the style of basketball. And, let’s be honest, the Big East was a basketball conference.
What could be better than catching a double-header of semi-final action featuring St. Johns, UConn, Syracuse, and Georgetown? That’s gone. And it’s not coming back.
Disclaimer: My alma mater, Boston College, is a Big East defector that I’m still really upset about. We don’t fit into the ACC. Not one bit. Our style of ball was very different. And the football situation in the ACC is just screwy. But culturally, you have a bunch of Southern schools, many of them large state schools and ALL of them very distinctly Southern (I don’t offer this as a criticism, mind you) and then you have this little Jesuit school up in Boston. Teams hate traveling to play us because of how far away we are and the weather. Our fans can’t go to any road games. Bleh. Maybe it made sense on a financial level or some other level (I never put much stock into the idea that academics have anything to do with athletic conferences), but it was a move that upset a lot of fans and has seemingly backfired: given that the goal of BC, VTech, and Miami’s addition to the ACC was to make it a football powerhouse in addition to a basketball powerhouse… well, that hasn’t quite worked out.
What is this “basketball” of which you speak? (Kidding.)
It’s undeniably true that the Big East as we know it is dead. There are only three members left, likely to become only one. The basketball roster has suffered far more than the football roster. This post primarily refers to discussions of the Big East more literally falling apart and the constituent schools having to go back to Conference USA or (as Darrell Dodds put it) beg the Sun Belt for admission.
Of course, some of how we view this depends on what perspective we see a conference through. Through a basketball perspective, I understand the lamentations (though fans will still have the Big Priest – whatever the Catholic 7+x refer to themselves as). I tend to view it more from an institutional perspective. The Big East, and C*USA(/Metro/GMW), have always been cousins of sorts (Big Cousin and Little Cousin, to be sure). Both have tended to focus on well-heeled private schools and urban research universities. The culture shock for those that were in the conference prior to to 2003 has to be significant, but Cincinnati and Louisville have been playing with Memphis and Tulane going back to the 70’s at least.
(Actually, it’s that angle that I think is one of the things that likely keeps Houston and SMU from going westward. They don’t go back to the Metro/GMW days, but they have a more natural home in the Big East, both the one that’s disintegrating and the one that’s reforming, than they do with the flagships and land grants in the west.)
(None of this should be construed as disagreeing with anything you said.)
The thing is, I could see a conference as geographically disparate as the Big East may end up actually being unsustainable. Professional leagues, in which players are paid millions to play sports as their job, have realized that crazy travel schedules are a negative for the league. It is why all the leagues have moved towards geographical groupings (with a few exceptions, such as Dallas being in the NFC East). It is why MLB sends teams on lengthy road trips, so that they can load up on games in a particular region and avoid multiple cross-country trips. And even with all that, we still see the effects of travel demands.
How is this going to work in college, where athletes are unpaid and are going to class and might be traveling well but not as well as the pros? Imagine if San Diego State remains and has to make multiple cross-country trips a year? You might eliminate not only Friday but Thursday as an option for athletes taking classes.
This is not to say that it WILL fail. But that a college conference stretched too far might collapse.
But, yea, the loss of the Big East tournament is the real crime here.
Well, some of it depends on which league we’re talking about. I thought it was a mistake for the Big East to invite Boise State and San Diego State partially for the reasons you describe. And I think it was a mistake for Boise and SDSU to accept. I think Boise State dodged a real bullet here, because I think they would have had a whole lot of difficulty competing with the ferocity with which they are accustomed. If San Diego State does stay, that’ll be to their detriment, but it’s only one team.
With Boise and SDSU out of the picture, however, it’ll be Dallas and points east. Which is more-or-less what Conference USA was before the 2003 realignment*, and the Metro Conference before that. What it costs in geography, it makes up for by existing mostly airport cities (ECU as an exception). All in all, it’s a better travel arrangement for South Florida or Houston than is the Mountain West Conference is for New Mexico or San Diego State (the Lobos and Aztecs simply have no better option, travel-wise).
It’ll also separate into divisions, which does help reduce travel costs. Also, no more trips to El Paso, which Conference USA members had been having to make (El Paso being closer to San Diego than it is to Houston).
* – The 11 teams in the conference were Army, East Carolina, South Florida, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, Birmingham, Southern Miss, Tulane, Houston, TCU, Marquette, DePaul, St. Louis, and Charlotte. Army was football-only and slated to leave before the hubbub.
If it is Dallas-east or thereabouts, that seems like something that can be maintained.
But…
“El Paso being closer to San Diego than it is to Houston.”
Whaaaaaaaat? That’s not how America is supposed to work.
“were almost all urban schools”
They still are…that was the idea behind the Metro which begat the original C-USA that mostly left for Big East FB.
I wish they’d change the name mostly so as to silence the whining of all the “former Big East” fans who keep bawling over how much “their” conference “sucks” now, when it is the fan bases of the Big Limbo schools (UH/SMU/UCF/UM/etc.) who have something legitimate to complain about.
Moved into a house that is not as advertised and the old one has already been sold.
Well, at worst those schools made a lateral jump (that should make them more money), but with some enhancements. I wonder the extent to which the departing Conference USA teams feel that the conference they are leaving is being sullied with likes of Florida Atlantic and North Texas.
As a Louisville alumni and fan I was disappointed with the decision to leave and the implosion of the conference. I liked the rougher style of play and the strength of the conference. The Big East tournament was always exciting and just a couple of years ago they flooded the national championship tournament with teams from the Big East.
My biggest disappointment is the destination. Around here the consensus seems to be that the ACC plays sissy-ball and UL is going to have a tough time for the first year or two. The only bright spot is the potential to beat both Duke and North Carolina every year.
Why is Delaware highlighted on the map?
Anapolis isn’t in Delaware? (I must have missed Maryland without realizing it.)
Hahaha…. No, I can’t say as it is.
Those eastern statelets are so hard to tell apart.
+1. Delaware: population 917,092; area 2,490 square miles. San Bernardino County, CA: population 2,035,210; area 20,105 square miles. Remind me again why the statelet gets two senators all for itself?
Same reason that Wyoming does with barely more than half of Delaware’s population. The Constitution cares not about such things.
Yet another reason why the quasi-religious veneration/fetishization of the Constitution is insane.
The Constitution may not play favorites, but at least when I wear one of my conspiracy hats, Congress certainly has. With that hat on, there’s a broad pattern (with exceptions, certainly) that the later you joined the union, the fewer state-level privileges you got. :^)
Now I don’t feel so bad for not knowing where anything near you is. 🙂
Made all the more difficult by the fact that Arapaho, Shoshona, and Deseret don’t exist in real life.
I proposed Shoshana as a baby name. Zazzy informed me one of the characters on “Girls” or “Gilmore Girls” or “Gilligan’s Island” or whatever has that name, so we couldn’t use it.
I blame your silly map fantasies for popularizing it to that extent.
I still claim that the end-state for the top level of college football is going to be four 16-team super conferences that run their own eight team playoff. The big four bowls will roll over for it because they go broke if those teams don’t play in their stadiums. The NCAA will roll over for it because those 64 teams can threaten to do serious damage to the men’s and women’s basketball tournament by holding their own. Any football school with aspirations of ever playing for the national title had better be figuring out which of those conferences they can get into. And there won’t be any of this “football only” membership; that’s the hurdle to keep the riff-raff out. It may take 20 years to get there, but that’s where it’s going. There may be some other conferences that are terrific for basketball — I certainly hope so. But if you’re going to play football at the highest level, you need to be thinking about where your slot is going to be.
There may be some schools currently in what will turn into the four super-conferences that will want to reconsider: staying in is likely to get rather expensive.
I just don’t see it happening. A power four is quite possible, though conferences would range from 12-18 teams. But the biggest obstacle to a complete separation from the rest of FBS isn’t the NCAA as a regulatory body so much as it’s congress. The BCS, present and future, aren’t making room for the Group of Five out of the kindness of their hearts or because they need the likes of Tulane and Colorado State. Not on a financial level. On a political level, it’s a much more perilous situation. And so they compromise.
I don’t disagree that the teams on the outside looking in need to figure out where in the top part of the system they can fit. But that’s nothing new. Teams in the lesser conferences not playing for national titles, generally. They’re playing for big games in the short term, and in the longer term they’re auditioning for the next round of expansion.
Hey Will,
Check the email address you use to post with. Sent you something.
Thank you for the heads up, Kazzy. I did get your email (all of my Trumwill stuff forwards to my regular inbox), but it actually looked like maybe someone phished your account and that if I clicked on it I would get digital cooties.
Having clicked on it, that’s pretty cool!
So, for those keeping score… it is looking more and more like Tulsa is going to get an invite to the Big East. Tulsa’s president conspicuously declined to appear at Conference USA’s Winter Meeting.
There are some rumors floating about that they will be joined by Southern Miss. Other rurmors point to the Big East bringing in Tulsa as #11 and then Navy as #12 when they join in 2015. Navy is looking a lot more committed to joining the conference than when I joined the map.
If Cincinnati and Connecticut get invites to the ACC, then it seems very likely that Southern Miss will be invited along with one another. Probably another Conference USA team, though perhaps a MAC program like UMass or Toledo.
Meanwhile, New Mexico State is looking good to fill Tulsa’s spot in Conference USA. The only problem is that their coach just quit – two weeks before signing day – and that never looks good. The team that was also rumored as being next in line is Western Kentucky. WKU recently hired Bobby Petrino, which looks a lot better than not having a coach. The frontrunner for the NMSU position is their interim, who most recently failed at Kent State. Petrino hasn’t failed anywhere except the NFL. One does not expect Petrino to stay at WKU very long, however.
What I think everybody should do:
–The Big East should definitely invite Tulsa. Whether they invite Southern Miss would depend mostly on whether they need the championship game for next year or not. Unless, of course, they have vacancies. More vacancies should go to: Southern Miss, Old Dominion, and Louisiana Tech in that order.
–Conference USA should invite New Mexico State. NMSU has solid academics, good basketball, and an excellent television footprint.