UConn’s national championship validates the Big East’s basketball-first plan
By
Eamonn Brennan
Apr 4, 2023
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HOUSTON — It looks obvious in retrospect. At the time it was anything but. College athletics had entered a collective delirium. There was a panic in the herd. The conventional wisdom was simple: Football would dominate everything. Traditional geographic rivalries woven into the culture of the sport, into the very fiber of lifelong fans’ lives, were less important than the strange sudden need to scramble around for TV dollars, those of which would be accorded to whomever could offer broadcasters the most attractive, widespread slate of college football inventory.
A years-long run on the bank had begun in 2009, when Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany realized he could ask for more money per Big Ten Network subscriber if the league could bundle itself into cable packages in major markets on the East Coast. This was not a particularly romantic reason to shake the foundations of collegiate sport, but he wasn’t wrong. Shortly thereafter, the B1G poached football-obsessed Nebraska from the Big 12. The Pac-10 agreed to offer membership to a host of Big 12 teams, including Texas schools as big as the University of Texas itself, existentially threatening no less a basketball blue blood than
Kansas, where the inventor of the sport was also the very first coach. In 2012, the Big Ten took
Maryland — a charter member of the ACC whose athletics department had been financially bereft, which leaped at the chance to make that sweet BTN cash — and ripped it out of the league it had helped found, where its fans felt culturally at home.
The anxiety soon spread to the Big East, a 16-team league with an identity crisis. Big East schools that played Division I football were drunk on dreams of playing football on bigger, larger stages. In 2012,
West Virginia decamped to the Big 12. In 2013,
Syracuse,
Notre Dame and
Pittsburgh announced they would leave for the ACC. “There was a tension between football schools and basketball schools,” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman said, standing on the NRG Stadium floor after Monday night’s national title game. “There was a sense of greener pastures with football.”
What happened next was kind of amazing, and remains the best thing to come out of any wave of conference realignment in recent history: The seven Catholic Big East schools took their ball and went home. Or, rather, they took their ball, went across the street, and built a whole new gym for themselves to play in, more or less from scratch. “They made a very courageous move,” Ackerman said.
And look at them now.
UConn’s fifth national title, sealed with another dominant performance in a tournament full of them, was the Big East’s third since the great schism of 2013. UConn won another in 2014, while it was a member of the American Athletic Conference, so we won’t officially count that — someone in the AAC league office’s head would probably explode — but it is undeniably true that programs
which are now Big East members have won four of the last 10 national championships. The first two New Big East titles were won by
Villanova, one of the relatively small, brave Catholic schools that decided to be true to itself and prioritize basketball, where a brilliant coach had turned one of history’s great underdogs into an annual powerhouse. The most recent was achieved by a program that chased the football dragon, lost itself culturally, and had to come home to fully restore its once-and-future glory.
“What we have,” Ackerman said, “is pretty special.”
It would be hard for even the most entrenched of partisans to argue. Dan Hurley called it the best league in the country from the dais Monday night, and while coaches always say that about their conferences, he did at least present a reasonable case: “We were the most successful in the NCAA Tournament, and we have the national championship,” Hurley said. “So we were the best league in the country this year.” Agree with that or not — the Big 12 was extremely good, after all, aspects of its postseason performance notwithstanding — the Big East was very high on any list of the most
fun. Any time any two of the top five teams in the league played, it was a television event worth tuning into, featuring high-level, flowing offensive basketball. Shaka Smart’s retooled Marquette was a revelation. Xavier, in its first year under Sean Miller, played top-10 offense at an appealingly high pace. Creighton was a fourth top-15 team in adjusted efficiency, one that came a bucket away from playing in the Final Four.
Fox Sports broadcaster Gus Johnson elevates most calls he’s on, the perfect complement to the rowdy (and at, for example, Providence, especially drunken) environments in professional gyms in the Northeast. The conference tournament at Madison Square Garden is the most goosebump-inducing postseason event outside of the NCAA Tournament, the perfect cultural coda to every finished season of Big East ball.
It is hard to imagine this stuff not existing in its current form, but the reality is hardly farfetched. Indeed, the timing in 2013 was particularly fortuitous. “The Big East needing a new TV home, and Fox just so happening to be launching Fox Sports 1, this new cable network and needing the programming, that was the marriage,” Ackerman said. “The schools were fortified by that.” Still, it wasn’t initially clear which half of the schism would be called the Big East. The cultural cachet that comes with the name could have wound up with the American Athletic Conference, which instead had to be branded from nothing — probably befitting its hodgepodge (and extremely football-oriented) composition.
