Big East Catholic Schools Ponder Leaving En Masse

... And starting their own basketball-only conference. This is what I want for Christmas.

Just reading about Tommy Tuberville this morning and gagging.... College football has gone slap-ass crazy. It is making university presidents, coaches, players, everybody do insane things on a daily basis. This conference realignment horseshit year in and year out has got to stop.

I don't blame those Catholic schools for wanting no part of it. I hope the Big East dissolves.

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/colleges/20121212_Big_East_basketball_schools_weighing_options.html

 

Pope opens his Twitter account today and suddenly this happens? Coincidence -- I don't think so.

 

I hope this happens.

 

I hate to dump on my two favorite sports, but college hoops makes college football look purer than Ivory Soap.

 

Boy, the Providence Mafia certainly didnt have an issue with those BCS checks coming in though.

 

Nooooo, dixie... really?

I say college football's gotten much worse. It's where all the money is.

I could be wrong, though. Convince me otherwise.

Which is currently worse, y'all, the whore house or the crack house?

 

The crack house. Not even close.

 

Basketball is more honestly corrupt, so to speak. Everybody in it is a hustler, so even the kids operate on a sound "what's in it for me?" basis.
Football is engaged in destroying the entire structure of college sports for what will wind up being little or no return for most schools. I don't think its far-fetched to imagine that in 2020-2025, we'll have the National Collegiate Football League with 32 teams, a playoff and a Higher Education Bowl with all the other schools having their games on the Ocho. The lucky ones, that is. The others will make it a club sport.

 

After what happened at Penn State? Are we thinking that kind of coverup of illegal and/or nefarious activity was an isolated incident? Not to mention PEDs being far more rampant in college football.

Hustlers they all may be in college basketball, but it seems so small time... So petty in comparison to the massive criminality of college football.

 

Nothing happened at Penn State. It was the media trying to take down Paterno [/blue font]

 

I suspect the Big East non-football schools will hook up with a bunch of the Atlantic-10 schools in some form. Who knows what the league will be called or who will be commissioner, etc?

St. John's, St. Joseph's, St. Bonaventure, LaSalle, Villanova, Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall, Duquesne, Rhode Island, Massachusetts. Perhaps VCU and/or Richmond or Charlotte.

I suspect they'd prefer to dump the midwest schools. When these conferences get too large, it makes scheduling a real headache. With more than 10, you almost have to split into divisions, which adds nothing in basketball or the other sports.

 

The numbers that matter for 'corruption' are 70 and 74. That's the percentage of D1 players who graduate school and play basketball and football, repsectively. That's the NCAA's numbers from the 2005 admissions class. Whether you trust the numbers or not takes some serious journalistic effort, but that should be the standard on corruption.

The schools are recruiting 17-19 year old kids to school and are paying them about 80,000 a year. That's tuition, meals, lodging, travel, hotels food on the road, airline tickets to games, clothing and sporting equipment. And don't think that isn't a big expense. I have a child who plays club lacrosse in a large DI program and these kids travel by van and stay in Econo-lodges and play 3-6 games a weekend. Its expensive and these kids travel as cheap as possible because its fund raising, dues and parents who pay the freight.. Men's lax tends to cost in the touhsands of dollars a year.
and Add another $10K/athlete for the D1 teams for the tutoring, supervised study halls and medical costs.

for the $80-90K that is expended per kid many schools are reaping 10's of millions of dollars. It's fairly egalitarian though, the 4th string offensive tackle receives the same dollar cost benefit as the starting QB. Since only 1.4% of the D1 players sniff pro sports, the corruption of the student athlete can be found in the grad rates.

BTW 88% of DIII student athletes graduate.