As consolidation and conference realignment continues, I had high hopes that the Big East would help protect itself by becoming a two division (East and West) basketball super conference by adding 5-7 mid western and western based traditional basketball schools such as Gonzaga, SMC, Grand Canyon, USF, Santa Clara, LMU, Pepperdine, Pacific and maybe even Dayton and/or Davidson if you can figure out how to manage their football programs. To me, if you have 16 to 18 teams in the conference you can limit travel by dividing the conference into West and East and playing a schedule that mostly matches up with teams in your division.
However, with Gonzaga going to the Pac 12 and that conference in talks with both GCU and SMC, the possibility of this arrangement having some strategic advantage becomes much less likely and therefore the benefits of doing it are highly diminished when you cannot get the best basketball schools in the west that do not play football. Today's news likely ends any such hopes I had for this change.
