Big East Catholic Schools Ponder Leaving En Masse

Love the idea. Would bring us back to Pre Big East when the ECAC was king.

 

Any chance they take Duke with them? PLEASE.

 

the non-football schools are more than half the voting membership at the moment, right? Can't they simply vote to no longer sponsor D1-FBS football so they can keep their tourney auto-bid without slumming it in a 21 team A-10?

 

Dave Bliss says hi.

 

They don't need a tourney auto bid. They could start their own league next summer and get half the league in the NCAA field.

I don't think the current A-10 format would hold. But I could see the A-10 dropping some teams in favor of current Big East schools. If you can get what you want within 100 miles, why go 1,000 miles. It's not like folks in Chicago are going to watch Providence vs. St. Joseph's just because DePaul happens to be at the bottom of the league. That's why I never bought into the TV "markets" nonsense.

 

Not unless Duke drops football.

 

Isn't Duke technically a Methodist college?

 

Yeah, it is. I think Wake Forest is Baptist.

The whole deal seems to be football schools vs. non-football schools.

Some of us are old enough to recall the Big East before its football days. Pitt, Syracuse and Boston College were football independents back them. It was a tremendous basketball league. Full double round-robin 18 game schedule and most games were all-out wars. In any given year, it rivaled the ACC as the best basketball conference in the country. John Thompson at Georgetown, Lou Carnesca at St. John's, Boeheim at Syracuse, a young Jim Calhoun at Connecticut, Rollie Massimino at Villanova, Gary Williams at Boston College, Rick Pitino at Providence.

It was about the time (80s) that college basketball started becoming a big deal and a money-maker. Then they watered it down for the sake of bringing in football schools like Va. Tech, Miami, Temple, Rutgers, etc.

 

I think a day will come when the bigger schools form football-only conferences that have nothing to do with where they house all other sports. And the sports world will better off for it.

 

Thing is, all the big football schools also have most of the other sports. Not always the other way around.

Not like, say, hockey or basketball, where someone is a power and either doesn't play football at all or plays on a much smaller level.

With the lone exception of Notre Dame, which seems to desparately wants to keep its TV deal, it seems like if you join a conference for football, might as well take the rest of the family along as well.

As an aside, if some of those schools ditched everything except football and men's basketball, would anyone care?

 

Krzyzewski is Catholic and for intents and purposes he is Duke sports.

 

Maybe the people who enforce Title IX.