By John Reagan
July 5, 2019



If any phrase defines the Big East Conference, it was one uttered nearly four decades ago by its founder, Dave Gavitt.

"The Big East," he said, "is not simply a league of convenience, but one of commitment."

True then, and truer now.

Founded to advance the cause of basketball among its seven member schools, the Big East struggled through two decades where basketball took back seat to a never ending struggle to compete in major college football. When external forces worked to drive the conference out of business on two different occasions, seven schools, led by two of its founding institutions, restored basketball to the front seat of its table. Commitment returned to the discussion.

At the forefront of these events stood a pair of college presidents. Jack DeGioia was a graduating senior at Georgetown when the conference was formed, while Rev. Brian Shanley was a junior at Providence College. In a combined 32 years of leadership at their respective institutions, they understood more than most what it took to build and to maintain the Big East conference to the top of intercollegiate athletics. And more than anyone else, they knew what it took to get it back there.


Dave Gavitt wasn't looking to change the course of college basketball history for sentimental reasons. As a college head coach, the reasons were much more urgent.

In 1973, the 35 year old Gavitt had led the Providence Friars to the Final Four, the first team from New England to do so in a quarter century. A return visit seemed improbable, however.

By 1975, the NCAA opened the tournament to at-large bids from major conferences, eliminating the awkward position of a #2 ranked Maryland team with six future NBA draft picks being denied entrance to the tournament because it lost its conference tournament final in overtime. More at-large bids meant fewer bids for the eastern and midwestern independents like Providence which had been regular participants. But beyond tournament bids, the top talent in the Northeast wasn't staying at home anymore, and the vestigial nature of the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) wasn't helping to keep them there. Gavitt rightly understood that the era of competing as a major college independent was about to end, and the ECAC's plan to force round-robin scheduling in the region would leave Providence playing a lot more games with Maine and Vermont than Syracuse and St. John's. PC basketball, a national name under Gavitt and Joe Mullaney before him, was about to take a major step back.

The origins of the Big East are parts of college sports lore: not only for its rapid ascent, but how they got away with it--the four leading basketball programs in the Northeast (Georgetown, Syracuse, St. John's and Providence) secretly planning a new conference in a series of meetings held at a hotel outside LaGuardia Airport. The unifying force was Gavitt, who persuaded, cajoled, and sometimes leaned on his quarrelsome brethren to make sure that the whole of the new conference was going to be far greater than the sum of seven independents.

"I did not know Frank Rienzo, but I was an assistant coach at Providence when John Thompson played," said Gavitt in 2006 upon his election to the Basketball Hall of Fame. "John said if the commitment was to make it the best league in the country, he was for it."

"I wanted no part of it," former St. John's coach Lou Carnesecca told the New York Daily News in 2011. "I didn't think we needed it. We were St. John's, we were still having our day in the sun. What, play some of those guys two times a year and then maybe again in a tournament? What did I need that for?

"And I turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong."

When Gavitt heard Carnesecca was coaching in Italy in the summer of 1978, he traveled to Europe and booked the same returning flight to New York.

"Our flight was delayed for five hours, so we went to lunch and drank a lot of wine. I worked on him the whole day," Gavitt recalled. "By the time we arrived at Kennedy, I convinced him to join the Big East. At least, that's my story."

"[Dave] told me it wasn't just going to be good for everybody else, it was going to be good for St. John's, too, and for New York," Carnesecca said. "He talked about a league that would make the best kids want to stay home more than they ever had."

"He was right about all of it."

With four schools on board, gaining commitment from other schools was no easy task. Rutgers and Holy Cross turned down the offer outright, Boston College and Seton Hall accepted. Gavitt had to convince the other athletic directors --Frank Rienzo at Georgetown, Jack Kaiser at St. John's, and Jake Crouthamel at Syracuse-- that a rural university in Storrs, Connecticut was a "sleeping giant". (When the committee needed an answer from Connecticut if would join prior to the formal announcement, the school's president was out of town and inaccessible by phone. Athletic director John Toner figured that it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission, and committed the school to the new conference on his own.)

The seven schools had a new league, but no name. Various ideas were wholly unsuitable: the Seaboard Seven, the Presidential Conference, the Mayflower Compact. Gavitt turned to a pair of PC alumni for some better ideas. The advertising firm of Duffy and Shanley made it official: the Big East Conference was announced on May 28, 1979.

But Gavitt's idea was more than a scheduling alliance. With competitive programs in each of the East's major television markets, the Big East set up its own syndicated TV contract, and with the debut of a new cable sports network in Bristol, CT, a relationship was born with the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, or ESPN. A weekly Monday night game of the week was attracting attention not just on the East Coast, but nationwide. No other league had such a reach. Naturally, the recruits followed.

The Big East had its share of characters right out of central casting: the bookish Jim Boeheim, the fiery John Thompson, the whimsy of Lou Carnesecca and Rollie Massimino. Up and comers like Gary Williams, P.J. Carlesimo and Rick Pitino soon followed. Teams were playing in NBA arenas, and Syracuse played in a dome. And the coaches wouldn't be anything without great players, of which there were so many.

Comparisons were natural to the Atlantic Coast Conference, then a seven team league with a popular post-season tournament held at the Greensboro Coliseum. But Gavitt had dreams beyond the likes of arenas like Greensboro. In 1979 he proposed that the league would eventually hold its tournament to New York. When one athletic director suggested New York meant the Meadowlands Arena, Gavitt was insistent: he wanted nothing less than Madison Square Garden. He understood the attention the conference would receive with its showcase in the world's most famous arena.

The name alone connoted the very best of the big city, as famously ad-libbed by Howard Cosell in a 1974 Frank Sinatra pay per view concert: "Live, from New York, the city whose landmarks are familiar all over the world, a world center for shipping, transportation, communications, finance, fashions, and above all, entertainment! A city that pulsates, always, because of the millions of people who live here, work here, visit here. And in the heart of the metropolis, the great arena: Madison Square Garden!"



 
In the fall of 1982, the deal was set. Gavitt had a memorable photo taken in front of the Garden's 7th Avenue marquee to announce the news. A three year, $1 million contract soon provided memories for a lifetime, with three consecutive finals broadcast in prime time on ESPN: #3 ranked St. John's winning the 1983 title, #2 Georgetown over Syracuse in 1984, and #1 Georgetown over #2 St. John's in 1985. As they would say on Broadway, a box office smash.

In its first three years, the Big East had earned a Final Four appearance, in five, a national title. Gavitt, as chairman of the NCAA selection committee, awarded the 1984 trophy to Georgetown and in 1985 saw the Big East placed three in the Final Four for the first and only time ever. Were it not for a late run by the Memphis State Tigers, it would have been four, with Boston College falling two points short of the sweep, 59-57.

"You couldn't duplicate what we did in the 80's," Tranghese said. "It was this little family operation who had climbed the mountain."

"You have to be careful greed doesn't set in," Carnesecca said to the New York Times. "So far, it hasn't. Look at the people who are [our] athletic directors. There's a lot of maturity there. They're not going to be dazzled. They're not going to build empires. That's important."


"This has got nothing to do with basketball. You know that. You're way smarter than that. This is just to do with football. You know that. And it's where everything's going." --Jim Boeheim, Syracuse basketball coach

But as Jeckyll had his Hyde, the Big East had an alter ego all its own, one it could never quite settle with.

In 1979, six of the seven founding members played football, but only two at the major college level. No one confused Eastern football with that of its southern counterparts. A season earlier, Syracuse had just closed its crumbling 26,000 seat Archbold Stadium, while Boston College finished 0-11, with its largest crowd of the season coming against Holy Cross. Football wasn't a driving priority within the new conference, but it could not escape it for long.

In 1981, Penn State applied for admission. The dominant program in eastern football, athletic director Joe Paterno did not want the Nittany Lions left behind in basketball despite its lack of commitment, with one NCAA appearance since 1955. Penn State alumna and sports writer Dana O'Neil once called Penn State men's basketball "a winter afterthought given all the tending and care of a vegetable garden positioned in the middle of a nuclear field."

By a vote of 5-3 (Providence, St. John's, and Georgetown were the reported "no" votes), the Nittany Lions came up one vote short for membership. In response, Paterno threatened to start a new all-sports conference and would take Syracuse and Boston College with him. Sensing the risk as well as Penn State's resolve, Gavitt cut Paterno off at the pass, adding a more basketball-friendly program in Pittsburgh to add another media market in the Northeast and scuttle Paterno's charge, at least for a while.

Some suggest that if Penn State had joined the Big East, there would never have been college realignment, as if Paterno would have somehow turned down the chance of paydays with Michigan and Ohio State just to play the likes of BC and Syracuse every year. The next two decades would show that when it comes to football, money always triumphs over loyalty.

The roots of the Big East's football problems started not from State College, but the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, throwing out the NCAA's monopoly to control television rights for college football, which it had exercised since 1952. Conferences were now free to execute their own TV deals, and to attract schools who saw a greater opportunity elsewhere.

It started with the University of Arkansas, which had chafed for years under a Southwest Conference rule that required guarantee fees for home football games that indirectly supported smaller schools at Baylor, SMU, TCU, and Rice. In 1990, Arkansas joined the Southeastern Conference. Penn State was next, joining the Big Ten. All eyes were on the three Big East football schools (Boston College, Pittsburgh, Syracuse) and remaining eastern independents as targets of other conferences, namely, the Atlantic Coast Conference. Sensing a need for action, the Big East moved to expand, but the case of characters had changed.

In 1990, Gavitt left the Big East to become CEO of the NBA's Boston Celtics. His successor was Mike Tranghese, the former Providence SID who had served as Gavitt's right hand man for over a decade. Tranghese wasn't a football man given his run at Providence, but he knew the impact if teams started to leave. As such, the Big East extended an invite to the University of Miami in 1990, the first expansion outside its Northeastern roots.

"To be very blunt with you, our future was at stake," Tranghese said. "If the Big East and the University of Miami could not have gotten together, I'm not certain we had an answer that would have satisfied the football concerns of Pitt, Boston College and Syracuse."

In addition to adding Miami, the Big East soon announced a football-only membership agreement with four Atlantic 10 schools (Rutgers, Temple, West Virginia, Virginia Tech) to comprise the Big East Football Conference, keeping the Northeast schools in the league and forming a firewall to northern ACC expansion. Instead of looking northward, the ACC signed Florida State, a football independent and Metro conference member in basketball, to the conference in 1992.

"I knew that someday soon we were going to have to address football," said Tranghese. "If we didn't, we'd be out of business in 10 years."

Four years of relative peace in the Big East were disrupted in 1995 when the Big East and SEC left the College Football Association (CFA) and its consolidated TV package for conference-only deals, setting off another round of realignment talk. The implosion of the Southwest Conference scattered its teams to the Big 12 and WAC that could now hold a championship playoff game in football. With 11 teams in the Big Ten and nine in the ACC, scenarios to get to the 12 team minimum for their playoff games were being explored.

If you're asking what this had to do with basketball, you would not be alone. For all its success as the bell cow of NCAA revenues through its annual basketball tournament, football drove the conversation, inasmuch as the major schools kept football revenues for itself rather than through an NCAA distribution, as in basketball. Power was concentrated in those schools with the largest television contracts--the more viewers (and by extension, the more schools), the greater the revenue potential.

And when Rutgers, Temple, West Virginia, and Virginia Tech petitioned for full Big East membership in 1995, the lines were now drawn between "basketball schools" (those without major college football) and the "football schools" with full membership in the conference. A proposal to add all four failed. The football schools then responded with a proposal for all eight football schools to leave and form a new all-sports league if an expansion vote did not go through.

A compromise offer was then proposed: two of the four would be admitted (Rutgers and West Virginia, each of whom were targets of other conferences). The split was averted, and later additions of Notre Dame and Virginia Tech retained the stalemate: seven basketball schools, seven football schools. Neither side was happy, and the next round of change would be a more severe test of the Big East's institutional commitments.


"We're committed to the Big East. You have our word."--Donna Shalala, University of Miami president

The 2002-03 season should have been a great year for Mike Tranghese and the Big East Conference. Four football teams were in the Top 25, one if which played in the national championship game. The conference swept the NCAA men's and women's basketball championships and the NIT as well. As great years go, it was anything but.

Tranghese spent much of that year fending off a circular firing squad among his college presidents. The ACC was openly courting as many as five different Big East schools to join its conference without going through Tranghese's office. Each school denied it despite visible evidence to the contrary. Each president pledged loyalty, and yet they were conspiring to do it anyway.

The first and foremost of these was the University of Miami, who was openly bidding between the Big East and ACC. Boston College was also exploring an early exit. Tranghese implored the schools to change its course. Five Big East schools filed suit against Miami and Boston College in Connecticut court, alleging civil conspiracy.

"By raiding the Big East, the ACC plans not only to add Miami, B.C. and Syracuse to its roster, but also to try to destroy the Big East as a viable competitor in major college football", read a news release. Such a move was putting the entire Big East "at risk of losing its guaranteed berth in one of the four [Bowl Championship Series] bowls, which will result in the loss of tens of millions of dollars, plus hundreds of millions more in lost television and radio broadcast contract rights and other harm."

"At the end of the day, [Miami] President [Donna] Shalala is going to have to look at the issues we've talked about, have to look at financial obligations, have to look at integrity issues," Tranghese said. "And then she's going to have to factor in the irreparable harm that's going to be caused to members of my league."

Given continued assurances by Shalala that Miami was not going to leave, she proved her word was absolutely no good.

"Ready or not, here we come!" she told the ACC, accepting an offer in July of 2003.

For its part, the ACC expansion effort was anything but smooth. Only one of the three target schools (Miami) were accepted by its voting presidents, turning down Boston College and leaving Syracuse one vote short when the chancellor at North Carolina State held her vote in hopes Notre Dame would be interested instead. The University of Virginia blocked attempts to add Virginia Tech until Virginia governor Mark Warner intervened to secure an invite to the Cavaliers' in-state rival. The Tech administration then made the awkward step from being a litigant in the Connecticut state lawsuit to one of its defendants, before the case was dismissed altogether.

To keep its BCS status, the Big East needed eight football teams, and was down to six. Vowing not to blind side other conferences, Tranghese reached out to Conference USA to add Louisville and Cincinnati as football schools, along with DePaul and Marquette the football/basketball balance. Sixteen was a huge number, but it offered stability.

One more addition was soon needed, as Boston College accepted a third ACC bid in October 2003.

The loss of BC stung as much as any. Despite its protestations to the contrary, the move was a seen as a money grab by the school, and a blatant slap at its fellow schools.

"Our decision to join the Atlantic Coast Conference is based on my judgment in terms of what is in the best interest of Boston College academically, athletically and financially," said BC president William Leahy, S.J.

"I'm very comfortable with the way we conducted ourselves."

By contrast, Syracuse president Kenneth Shaw called it "a double agent among us."

"Three months ago, the presidents, chancellors and athletic directors of the six remaining Big East football schools sat face to face and pledged their loyalty to one another and to the Big East," said Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel. "I guess handshakes don't mean much anymore."

Eight years later, Crouthamel would eat his own words.


"ESPN is the one who told us what to do."--Gene DeFilippo, Boston College athletic director

If the events of 2003 were crazy enough, it pales in comparison to the Big East's upheaval in 2011 and 2012. Where the 2003 changes were those of a greedy competitor, the destablization of the Big East came from its own TV partner.

From its earliest days as a subsidiary of Getty Oil, ESPN and the Big East were partners in a remarkable ascendancy of sports and television. Nearly every great moment of the conference -'Big Monday", the Sweater Game , Bill Raftery's call of "Send it in, Jerome!", the Georgetown-Princeton game, the six overtime game with Syracuse and UConn, and nearly 20 Big East championship games had all been a part of the ESPN network.

Entering 2011, the ESPN TV contract paid football schools $3.1 million per year and $1.5 million for the basketball schools. Its offer for the 2013-22 cycle increased that amount to $13.8 million a year for football and $2.4 million a year for basketball schools, a nine year, $1.1 billion offer, or $130 million per year.

What seemed an obvious choice by most Big East presidents was not a unanimous one. Paul Tagliabue, the Georgetown alumnus, former NFL commissioner, and conference media consultant, told the presidents he considered the bid undervalued given the rise in fees coming to other BCS conferences -in fact, the Pac-12 was offered a 12 year, $2.7 billion offer, or $225 million per year. In a second vote, the presidents voted 16-0 to decline ESPN's offer.

The other voice in the room arguing not to accept the deal was the chairman of the Big East Council of Presidents, Pittsburgh chancellor Mark Nordenberg, whose role in the instability which followed can be interpreted between unethical at best and, at worst, duplicitous.

A year earlier, Nordenberg informed the Big East offices that Pitt would listen to offers from other conferences. In a letter later printed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nordenberg wrote that "To be equally explicit, though, the fact that [athletic director Steve Pederson] and I are participating in these processes should not be viewed as a sign that we would not seriously assess any such opportunities if they did arise. To the contrary, we almost certainly would do so."

Which they did.

With full knowledge of the Big East's confidential revenues and media rights strategy, Nordenberg and Pitt entered into negotiations with the ACC, with the tacit support of Boston College, which admitted to the Boston Globe that it would block any effort by Connecticut to do the same, opening the door for Pitt, not UConn, to join the ACC.

"We didn't want them in," athletic director Gene DeFilippo told the Boston Globe. "It was a matter of turf."

The constant unrest also came with the tacit support of ESPN, for one very notable reason: with a right of first refusal on a new TV contract, it was in ESPN's interests to drive down the value of the new contract. The simplest way to do so was redirect its most valuable teams to one of its other partners, namely, the ACC.

Which they did.

A day removed from Dave Gavitt's death in September 2011, Pittsburgh and Syracuse gave notice to leave the Big East by 2013, joining a lucrative ACC TV deal from ESPN that had been signed for $1.8 billion among the schools, three months after Nordenberg had recommended his fellow presidents reject the ESPN offer to the Big East.

Where the conference once soared under the vision of Dave Gavitt and grit of Mike Tranghese, the current commissioner, John Marinatto, was unprepared by the decision. The third commissioner from Providence College in as many selections, the former Friar AD was roundly criticized for letting the schools go. "This sadly looks like a colossal failure of leadership on the part of a commissioner who is in over his head," wrote the New York Daily News' Dick Weiss. "Syracuse and Pitt would have never dissed previous commissioner Mike Tranghese like this. But Marinatto is no Mike Tranghese."

Marinatto's response was a tepid one. "Although I was obviously very disappointed to learn the news about the ACC's being in discussions about membership with the University of Pittsburgh and Syracuse University, I continue to believe the Big East Conference is well positioned for the future and that the events of the past 24 hours will unify our membership." He resigned as commissioner eight months later.

And for Nordenberg? A HoyaSaxa.com editorial in 2011 was blunt:

"As the chairman of the [Big East Presidents] Council, it was Nordenberg which led his fellow presidents not to accept a mammoth seven year TV deal from ESPN, arguing that in the open market, the conference would garner even greater bids. Now there may be no open market, and what's left of the Big East may get pennies on the dollar as the ACC has locked in its own deal, exceeding $1.8 billion, with ESPN.

It was Nordenberg who lobbied Texas Christian University to put aside the Mountain West to join a stable and growing Big East. Now, with TCU's exit ticket punched in the Mountain West and Pitt's hasty exit, the Horned Frogs wonder what they have gotten itself into. It was Nordenberg and Pittsburgh officials which openly stalled on Villanova's move to join Big East football, citing its itinerant stadium issues. Not only has that issue been rendered moot, but now there may be no home for a I-A Wildcat program at all, which would serve the ACC's newest school just fine.

It was Nordenberg who had access to financial data of the conference, information he could use when negotiating with with ACC commissioner John Swofford and cut a deal that would not only boost Pitt's value to the ACC, but send the rest of the Big East's I-A schools in a mad dash for lifeboats.

When someone as deferential to college administrators as ESPN analyst Dick Vitale openly criticized Nordenberg this weekend, you could tell that the lines of collegiality among the sport have been fractured. It's one thing to leave conference relationships, teams do it all the time. It's another thing to leave in stealth--sadly, schools do this, too. It's yet another to do both while in a position of fiduciary leadership in the very conference you are destabilizing.

"I want to emphasize that this is not a normal case of member withdrawal from an athletic conference. This is a case that involves broken commitments, secret dealings, breaches of fiduciary responsibility, the misappropriations of conference opportunities and predatory attempts to eliminate competition." Mark Nordenberg said those words eight years ago when accusing Boston College of many of the same tactics he employed in Pitt's departure from the Big East.

"Breaches of fiduciary responsibility, the misappropriations of conference opportunities and predatory attempts to eliminate competition"...the words of 2003 are his own remarkable, if self-fulfilling, prophesy."

"You are not going to convince me they took Syracuse and Pitt just for football," said Tranghese in a 2012 interview. "It was pure basketball. They were sick of getting beaten up by the Big East so they tried to destroy the Big East. They said that was not their intention, but it has to be your intention."

But this wasn't the only story swirling about the Big East. In an attempt to keep its football ship afloat, Marinatto cast a ever-widening net to reel in as many football schools as possible, with a list that seemed to change by the day.

In 2010, Texas Christian University was invited to join by 2012, but received a bid to the Big 12 in the interim and never played in the conference.

A month after Pitt and Syracuse left, West Virginia gave notice--not for the ACC, but the Big 12, which was losing Texas A&M and Missouri in another realignment saga and needed help. In a statement, the WVU president proclaimed that "The Big 12 is a perfect fit for West Virginia University", despite no member schools within an 850 mile radius of its campus.

A swirl of schools were added to future Big East rolls: Central Florida, Houston, and Southern Methodist, which would serve to replace Pitt, Syracuse, and WVU, with Air Force, Navy, and Boise State joining for football only. (Efforts to add Brigham Young and San Diego State would later fall through.) In 2012, Memphis and Temple would send the list to 18 all-sports schools.

In September, Notre Dame announced it would leave for the ACC as well, though retain its independent status in football. "We now have ESPN personalities all but gloating about an ACC addition at the expense of [the Big East] that just had its negotiating position with ESPN further weakened," wrote the web site Big Lead Sports.

"At this point, only a few things are certain", wrote Bill Koch of the Cincinnati Inquirer. "Trust and integrity among college athletics officials are in short supply, replaced by greed and an every-school-for-itself mentality."


With the exceptions of Notre Dame, DePaul, and Marquette, every expansion decision of the Big East over the prior 20 years revolved around football, a fact that did not go unnoticed by a growing faction of dissatisfied basketball schools. In 2011, an unidentified pair of basketball schools sent out feelers to leave the Big East but opted against it; by 2012, six schools had expressed informal comments about an exit. It was a plan that fell short in theory as well as in practice. If they were to remain as a coherent group, they needed seven to retain an autobid in the NCAA tournament, and the one which hadn't joined remained the most influential of them all. A founding member of the conference, Georgetown University was hesitant to leave, and made it clear they wanted to stay.

In 2012, Georgetown was still a Top 20 basketball program and the most visible of the seven schools from a national standpoint. In a Big East tournament which had just seen two expansion teams (Cincinnati, Louisville) competing in the final for the first time ever, four of the bottom five seeds in the event were basketball-centered schools: Seton Hall, Villanova, Providence, and DePaul. Without Georgetown, these schools had very little leverage with which to make a break.

More changes followed. To some surprise, Rutgers joined Maryland in jumping to the Big Ten, for no other good reason than the money available to it from the Big Ten's cable TV network. Connecticut was expressing renewed interest in a move to the ACC, and in November, the Big East announced Rutgers' replacement: Tulane, whose basketball program was flagging at best, averaging just 2,267 a game in a 3,600 seat gym built in 1933.

The selection of Tulane's was seen as a tipping point of sorts. Georgetown signed on to what became informally known as the Catholic 7, which announced its withdrawal from the Big East on Dec. 15, 2012.

"Earlier today we voted unanimously to pursue an orderly evolution to a foundation of basketball schools that honors the history and tradition on which the Big East was established" read the statement. "Under the current context of conference realignment, we believe pursuing a new basketball framework that builds on this tradition of excellence and competition is the best way forward."

DeGioia assumed a hands-on role in marshalling the resources of the schools to figure out a way forward, and one in relative stealth. Though criticized in the media for leading what Pete Thamel of Sports Illustrated referred to as the "Georgetown league", a story by John Feinstein of the Washington Post countered that argument. DeGioia took the lead, Feinstein wrote, because the other six presidents were largely disinterested in doing so.

With prior experience with the NCAA and a leadership role with the Knight Commission, DeGioia's understanding of intercollegiate athletics was much more hands-on than the five priests and one interim president among the other six schools. His leadership also aligned the schools to Gavitt's founding mission: basketball-focused schools in major metropolitan areas that were built on trust and commitment. He wanted no members eyeing the next train out of town.

With the seven schools committed to the concept, DeGioia and Providence College president Rev. Brian Shanley began the planning. This was not to be a handshake deal, but a strategic move. The new league would be based in New York, where the media was. The commissioner was to be someone with specific acumen on sports and media, which led the Big East to Val Ackerman, an academic All-American at Virginia who served as a vice president with the NBA and the first commissioner of the WNBA.

The schools enlisted the New York firm of Proskauer Rose, chaired by Georgetown alumnus Joseph Leccese, to represent their interests. It was Leccese who helped execute the long term extension of the Big East tournament contract at Madison Square Garden, and was recognized as one of the leading sports attorneys in the nation. Leccese knew what to say, and more importantly, what not to, when other schools started expressing interest in joining the Catholic 7.

Through initial media reports had the as-yet unnamed conference growing to 12 schools, this was never the plan. Initial consensus grew to a 10 team alignment, returning a round robin scheduling format and settling on schools with the most impact and commitment. Two schools, Xavier and Butler, were early favorites, the latter being highly sought after after back to back NCAA finals appearance in 2011 and 2012 under coach Brad Stevens. While reporters targeted the likes of Gonzaga, Siena, and Virginia Commonwealth as likely targets, DeGioia's approach was much more methodical.

One of these candidates was Creighton University. With roots in the Missouri Valley Conference dating back to 1928, a move would change the school's basketball trajectory. Having learned of the move as a member of Marquette's board of directors, Creighton president Timothy Lannon S.J. had the support of presidents at Marquette and DePaul, but it wouldn't be that simple. As he relayed to the Omaha World-Herald in June 2013, Rev. Lannon had to work through Leccese, not just the presidents.

"I want to be very clear with you about this conversation," Lannon recalled Leccese saying. "'It's not a conversation about you being invited to join.' But if Lannon would sign a confidentiality agreement, Leccese said, there were some things they could talk about. Lannon signed the agreement the next day, and Leccese called again. He then explained to Lannon the legal structure of the new league and its financial arrangements. Leccese said he would send Lannon a copy of the league's terms, again making it clear this was not a formal invitation."

Having received a non-committal statement of support in his personal conversations with DeGioia, Rev. Lannon told Leccese that he assumed Creighton was being seen as a candidate only if the league went to 12. According to Lannon, Leccese replied, "Not necessarily."

The approach of non-disclosure kept the politicking out of the papers, and in some ways, allowed the process to fly under the radar of ESPN. The nondisclosure extended even to the schools' athletic directors, most of whom were not part of the discussions. It was no surprise, perhaps, that when the schools appeared in New York to announce the new league, there were ten presidents on the stage, not ten athletic directors. Front and center: Jack DeGioia and Brian Shanley, in whose leadership it could be rightly said, everything old is new again.

 
The seven schools were leaving with no conference, no tournament, no TV contract, and no place to go. Three months later, they had a name, a tournament, and a TV deal. How did they pull it all together?

In hindsight and upon closer inspection, the basketball schools had carefully chosen a surgical strike, one that even the late Dave Gavitt would have appreciated. Rather than pay their exit fees and leave the stage, the basketball schools were prepared to take their time, and in doing so, put enormous pressure on those who would remain.

Mike Aresco was four months into his term as Big East commissioner when the dam broke. The basketball schools were calling the question on a divorce where the remaining football schools were least prepared for it, and all the more vulnerable in negotiations because of pending commitments--both to ESPN and to eight new schools who wanted in but not without a sense of stability. And soon.

The conference had begun to take on water by the failure to accept the original ESPN television offer. Those that departed to the ACC (and by extension, West Virginia) did so by paying millions of dollars in exit fees to expedite their departure, but the basketball schools chose not to. They exercised a clause in the Big East bylaws to honor a 27 month waiting period that would have kept them in the league through June 2015.

No football school would justify a 27 month purgatory to save a few million dollars. For the basketball schools, time was on its side.

Another complicating issue: who owned what? The original Big East bylaws held the assets of the conference jointly, so in the case of a split the seven schools had a partial claim to everything--the name, the contracts, and most of all, its bank accounts -- the kind of claims that could be taken to litigation with no end in sight.

There was an even more dangerous threat at Aresco's doorstep--dissolution.

The uneasy alliance of football and basketball schools dating back to 1991 was a stalemate of sorts--a two-thirds vote was required for any material change to the conference and nether the football nor the basketball schools could exercise it alone. At 16 schools, it was an even split.

Following the departure of Pittsburgh, Syracuse, West Virginia, and Notre Dame, the basketball schools now made up seven of the 12 voting members, or 58 percent. As late as November 2012, there were growing concerns that two more schools, Connecticut and Louisville, were negotiating to join the ACC.

"Losing a UConn or Louisville would also give the basketball schools the opportunity to engineer an unprecedented power play and vote to dissolve the league," wrote the Providence Journal. "According to the Big East's bylaws, the conference can be dissolved by a two-thirds vote of all members. The seven basketball schools, which include Providence College, would own that voting advantage over three [remaining] all-sports members (Cincinnati, South Florida and either UConn or Louisville). That voting edge would disappear in July, when new members Central Florida, Houston, Memphis and SMU come on board."

In the meantime, there was roughly eight months where a dissolution vote could be exercised at any time, with dire consequences for the football schools which remained. Not all were getting an invite to another conference, so where would they go?

As an attorney, Aresco knew full well that if this went to the courts, the conference would not survive.

Those remaining really needed the seven basketball schools to leave, and soon. But at what price?

They were about to find out.


"And Esau said: 'Behold, I am at the point to die; and what profit shall the birthright do to me? And Jacob said: 'Swear to me first'; and he swore unto him; and he sold his birthright unto Jacob."-- Genesis 25:32-33

Six days after the public announcement, a Big East attorney sent a letter to the presidents of its 12 member schools, a copy of which CBS Sports.com obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. It outlined what the seven basketball schools knew all along: the Big East Conference held nearly $120 million in conference funds now in question, including:

• $18.8 million in exit fees "on deposit" or due from Pitt, Syracuse, and West Virginia, as well as a $5 million exit fee paid in good faith by a TCU program which never formally joined the conference;
• $25 million in exit fees due from Louisville, Rutgers, and an additional sum from the Syracuse and Pittsburgh settlements;
• $25 million due in entrance fees from incoming members;
• $2.5 million due when Boise State opted to terminate its entrance agreement;
• As much as $50 million in NCAA basketball credits payable through 2018 as liquidated damages from the departures of Pitt, Syracuse, Louisville, and West Virginia (with Rutgers not having qualified for the NCAA tournament during this time); and
• An undisclosed "Conference Reserve Fund" payable to the schools on a pro-rata basis.

The letter also carried a number of interrogatories to the basketball schools which may have tipped Aresco's hand. It included the following:

1. Would you be amenable to an earlier separation date?"

2. "If so, what is the earliest date you would consider?"

3. Would you be amenable to allowing the other group of schools to retain the Big East name under appropriate conditions?"

4. "Would you consider a change in format that might allow both groups to hold a shorter tournament at (Madison Square Garden), or would you consider other potential alternatives (such as alternating years with the other group at MSG)?"

Now, it was more than money. The birthright of the conference was on the table.

What was once a 16 team all-sports conference would be shrinking to as few as three remaining schools without a negotiated settlement. This complicated matters to get a television deal signed and put the Big East at risk of no television deal during the 27 month wait period, since the networks could terminate the deals given the material changes in the conference. Without a TV deal, the new entrants might well have followed San Diego State's lead and stayed where they were. The football schools needed a minimum of eight schools to maintain eligibility for the revenues of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) that were vital to these schools' athletic survival, but no one would come aboard without a stable TV deal, a deal that had been rejected by the league just a year earlier.

The attorney's interrogatory now put other items on the table. Outside of Connecticut, the Big East name was not important to the remaining schools and the various newcomers planning to arrive. Louisville coach Rick Pitino, not a party in the legal discussions but a Big East legacy dating to his days coaching at Providence, publicly said the name meant more to the schools who left than those who remained.

And what about its basketball tournament? The original multi-year deal with Madison Garden was called the Big East's "million dollar check" at its 1982 signing, but the current tournament was now approaching $2 million per year. Beyond UConn, playing in New York was not a priority to schools like Tulane or Tulsa, and the stability of the football conference was more important than any basketball venue. As long as there were open legal matters, no one was safe amidst the most important item on their plate: the money needed to sustain a BCS football conference.

Like a modern day Esau, the Big East football schools signed away whatever they could for a multi-million dollar bowl of stew:

The name? Sold.

The branding? Sold.

The history and records? Sold.

The Madison Square Garden contract? Sold.

In exchange, the seven basketball schools waived their rights to over $100 million in accumulated exit and entrance fees and the NCAA revenue credits previously relinquished by departing members, though the basketball schools were not required to surrender its own NCAA credits in the move. The transfer came with a twist--it didn't cost the basketball schools much of anything that was theirs. In reality, the basketball schools remitted sums paid to the conference by those who departed in haste. Put another way, schools like Georgetown and Villanova bought their conference back with the exit fees from Syracuse and Pittsburgh, without a single day in court.

But what the basketball schools didn't ask for is even more compelling, and tells the second half of this remarkable wager: they didn't acquire the corporate assets of the conference, or in this case, its liabilities. With some help from a Georgetown alumnus, the basketball schools were about to deliver a one-two punch to ESPN and the college basketball world.

ESPN's leverage on TV contracts was the running subplot of this saga. It held a right of first refusal on any Big East TV deal and by reducing the conference's marketability, it allowed the value of the contract - what it paid the conference - to be reduced as well. Having neutered NBC's attempts to return to college sports broadcasting, its hegemony was unmatched.

In 2012, a new player arrived on the scene. When Fox executives were considering a 24 hour cable sports network to compete with ESPN, they talked to Tagliabue, and Tagliabue talked to the basketball schools. A network needs content, and college basketball is content. Fox also needed teams, right away, that were not under ESPN's contractual yoke.

In March 2013, the parties announced a landmark 12 year, $500 million dollar TV deal beginning the following season, doubling the rights fees the schools earned through the overall ESPN agreement from under $2 million to $4.2 million per school, with over 100 broadcast games a season across what would grow to 10 schools with the additions of Creighton, Butler, and Xavier. It wasn't the size of the Big 10 or SEC TV contracts, but it didn't have to be, either. Not only was the Big East about to return, but people could watch it grow along the way.

The folks in Bristol didn't take the news very well. To this day, ESPN avoids direct references to the Big East in much of its college basketball programming, heeding the old adage to never promote your competition. As ESPN was quick to declare a "requiem" for the conference in a celebrated 2014 documentary (its own Jay Bilas going so far as to summarily declare there was no Big East anymore), Fox Sports 1 would make it their own.

The frosting on the cake was evident-- because the seven schools did not acquire the corporate assets of the conference, it did not assume the contracts signed by the former conference, including the right of first refusal that ESPN held on the TV deals. Instead, as a separately incorporated entity now situated in New York, the new "Big East Conference Inc." could sign with anyone it wanted. And it did.

"This name is bold. This name is strong. This name is memorable," Rev. Shanley said of the conference name created at his father's advertising firm in 1979. "That's why it's been important for us to keep that name and keep that legacy going."

By contrast, the football schools that rebranded as the American Athletic Conference settled on a seven year, $130 million contract across football and basketball with ESPN, paying each school about $1.8 million.

"This is an extraordinary time for the Big East, and we couldn't have wished for a better start to our new future," DeGioia said at the press conference announcing the media rights deal. "We have ten incredible schools, have retained our storied name, and have solid partnerships with Fox Sports and Madison Square Garden. We look forward to our continued work together, to strengthening our relationships, and to the truly exceptional future that this will set for our athletics programs."


The end of this article was prepared as a contrast between the Big East at 40 and its forebears at the American Athletic Conference (AAC), preparing to depart its Providence offices this summer for a move to Dallas, symbolic of its own realignment to a southern and western football conference.

Because that's what the AAC is now, a football conference. Its football championship between Memphis and Central Florida drew 45,176, but just 7,223 showed up for the finals of its basketball tournament. Forty years removed from the Big East's debut at the Providence Civic Center, the schools of the AAC are moving its tournament to the Dickies Arena, located in Ft. Worth, TX.

But a week ago, that page of the article was tossed in the virtual trash. The University of Connecticut (re)wrote the ending all by itself.

The clues were in plain sight: a $41 million athletic deficit, a flagging football program, a university president whose term ended on June 30, 2019, and the fact that the millions paid to UConn athletics from the 2013 settlement had finally been exhausted. The school had long enjoyed an open door to talk with the Big East if they sought a change, but resisted it on numerous occasions, hoping against hope that the ACC might change course and invite UConn to be its 16th team; or, absent that, that a new TV contract for the AAC going into effect in 2020 would help soften the blow. But when the new ESPN contract sought to move much of the AAC's coverage to streaming platforms at the exclusion of its relationship with the SNY cable network, outgoing president Susan Herbst made the call to New York.

Within five days from when the story was first leaked, the deal was done.

"On the 40th anniversary of our founding in 1979, we're very excited to welcome back the University of Connecticut, a Big East charter member," said commissioner Val Ackerman a the announcement ceremony. "As a group of schools rooted in basketball preeminence, we can think of no better partner than UConn to join us in perpetuating the rivalries, traditions, and successes that have made the Big East unlike any other conference in college basketball. We know that our competitions and the experiences of our student-athletes, coaches, and supporters across all of our sports will be greatly enriched by UConn's return."

"The opportunity to add a member who is a national basketball brand, that's in our geographic footprint, who has an outstanding fan base with proven support of our biggest annual event, and who brings the added bonus of having a deeply etched, shared history with us, intense rivalries with many of our school, all that taken together represented an opportunity that we simply couldn't pass up," she added.

"The 2020 recruits and beyond are going to be given the opportunity to play on the greatest stage in college basketball," said UConn men's basketball coach Dan Hurley. "When you've got the history and tradition we have at UConn, the fan base, the quality of the university, who wouldn't want to play here now?"

"I think we all appreciate the AAC, but the Board feels this is in the best interest of the programs," said Tom Ritter, interim chair of the University of Connecticut Board of Trustees. "Somewhere, Dave Gavitt and John Toner are misty-eyed and exchanging high fives right now."

"No league was put through the realignment grinder quite like this one, and yet it has emerged with its soul intact, perhaps reassembled would be the better word," wrote Pat Forde at Yahoo Sports. "A conference built on basketball found itself abandoned by football, then regrouped and went back to what made it great to begin with. The Big East owes a lot to Villanova for winning two national titles this decade and providing some heavyweight clout, but the rest of the lineup includes relevant modern programs in major media markets. And now UConn comes back to add another major player."


In its 40th year, one can argue that the Big East Conference is not what it once was, and that's okay. If a generation of fans will have never felt the heat of a Syracuse-Georgetown final, a strutting Rick Pitino walking onto the Garden floor or the sound of the buzzer forcing a sixth overtime on a long Thursday morning, know that there are new memories amongst us because seven schools took it upon themselves to make it possible.

In 2018, on the occasion of its 35th anniversary of the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden, a retrospective was played on the Madison Square Garden video board. It includes a brief interview from Len Berman asking Lou Carnesecca, whose St. John's team had just won the 1983 tournament final, when his team's run was coming to an end.

"Coach of the year, regular season, now the tournament championship, where does this magic ride end?" asked Berman.

With a humorous glare in return, Carnesecca responded, "Where does it end? Where does it end??"

And it's not over yet, which is the best news of all.