Conference Realignment: Big East Better off Splitting Football and Basketball

As much havoc as conference realignment in college football has wrought on the Big 12 over the past year or so, no league has taken it on the chin as hard, or for as long, as the Big East.

The losses of Syracuse and Pittsburgh to the Atlantic Coast Conference are just the latest in a long line of departures that have left the conference weaker than ever and, perhaps, on the verge of an unprecedented split between football and basketball.

Frankly, having such a huge disparity between football and basketball just isn't working for the Big East anymore—nor has it ever, really. For the time being, the Big East has just eight schools in football—Syracuse, Pitt, West Virginia, Louisville, UConn, Cincinnati, South Florida and Rutgers—but a whopping 16 in basketball, by far the most of any of the Big Six conferences.

With the addition of Texas Christian next year, those numbers will swell to nine and 17, respectively.

And when Syracuse and Pitt are finally free to leave for the ACC, those figures will settle back down to seven and 15. Mind you, the minimum football membership for a BCS conference is eight, though realistically speaking, a conference these days should maintain at least 12 members in football to remain relevant in that endeavor.

A Brief History of The Big East

The imbalance between the two sports is built into the league's fabric and has long been an impediment to its growth in football, though never before to quite so detrimental an effect as in this current climate of predatory reshuffling.

The Big East was born in 1979 as primarily a basketball league, with Syracuse, Providence, St. John's and Georgetown as its charter members and Seton Hall, Connecticut, Holy Cross and Boston College as its first invitees (Holy Cross turned down the invitation). The league added Villanova in 1980 and Pittsburgh in 1982 but rejected Penn State in 1985, choosing instead to maintain its mission as a hoops-first haven.

The conference didn't shift gears into football until the early 1990s, when Miami, Virginia Tech, Temple, West Virginia and Rutgers came on board, with the Hokies and the Scarlet Knights partaking in football only. The mix grew stranger still when Notre Dame, the diamond of college football, decided on the Big East in everything other than football.

That unstable conglomeration ultimately gave way to a seismic shift in 2005. After watching Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College walk to the ACC, Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese countered by poaching Louisville, Marquette, USF, Cincinnati and DePaul from Conference USA.

Unfortunately for the conference, those additions only served to widen the chasm between basketball and football further, thanks to Marquette and DePaul lacking Division I football credentials.

Pigskin Priorities

Which, finally, brings us to the present day, when the Big East once again finds itself on the wrong side of conference expansion—reactive rather than proactive. The faces at the top may have changed, with John Marinatto taking over for Tranghese in 2009, but the song remains the same.

Inevitably, if the Big East is to survive as a BCS conference in a world where football ultimately pulls the proverbial cart of college athletics, it will have to take on more football schools, setting its sights on 12 as the magic number.

But then, once again, the disparity between football and basketball becomes a huge impediment, assuming the conference remains devoted to its original, hardwood-centric mission. Unless schools like Villanova or Marquette somehow make the jump to the FBS level in football, expansion to 12 teams will require that the league become a 20-team monster conference in basketball, lest the Big East charter football-only membership from here on out.

Which brings back to the fore the same selectivity that got the Big East into this mess in the first place.

Too-Late Solution?

At this point, there appear to be only two solutions to the Big East's long-standing woes, neither of which is all that palatable. The first, as previously mentioned, is to simply expand the conference for the sake of football stability, basketball bloating be damned.

The second is to draw a line in the sand between the football schools and, well, the non-football schools, between the haves and the have-nots, and split the Big East into two conferences—one with eight basketball schools and the other with however many football schools Marinatto thinks he needs.

In essence, the basketball schools would then congregate into the conference of private Catholic schools that it had essentially been upon its inception. After all, the eight non-football schools currently in the Big East are all private Catholic institutions while most of the remaining schools are located in areas with sizable Catholic communities.

Not that the conference's non-football schools would ever agree to such a mutinous proposition. That would mean giving up their handsome ransom from the Big East Network, a proposition too costly to jam down the throats of even the most suppliant of university presidents.

Like any major conference, the Big East will ultimately need much more than a common religious, cultural or even regional heritage among its members to maintain its place in the BCS. It needs schools, football schools (and money) to be exact, no matter the cost to the other sports.

Because in today's world of college athletics, wherein television dollars trump common sense 11 times out of 10, football is where the money is and, as in life, money talks.

And the rest, whatever you'd prefer to call it, walks.

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