After last night's "muddled" matchup between Louisville and Rutgers, it's time for the Big East to get out of football and return to its roots—basketball. The defections of Rutgers and Louisville to the Big 10 and ACC respectively and the additions of Tulane and East Carolina has further highlighted how desperate and irrelevant the conference has become in football. People always say when you love something, you have to let it go—but sometimes it's better to just smash it to bits.
In 1979 the Athletic Directors at St. John’s, Providence, Georgetown and Syracuse got together to form a new basketball conference. Invitations were extended to Boston College, UConn and Rutgers—despite Rutgers declining, the Big East was born. Throughout the 80's players such as Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullins, Dwayne Washington and Ed Pinckney made the Big East the best basketball conference in the country. Football wasn't part of the equation to begin with, and it wasn't until 1991 that football even became a Big East sport.
And that decision to try to compete in football led to the Big East’s downfall. Instead of a close-knit conference that had great rivalries, football has forced the Big East to expand all over the country making the traditional rivalries practically non-existent. In 2015, after this latest round of realignment, UConn will be the only remaining original Big East member in the football part of the conference and they didn’t become a D1 football program until this century.
The Big East will remain the feeding grounds for all of the other conferences as long as the football situation is so disjointed. The remaining basketball-only programs—Georgetown, St. John’s, Marquette, DePaul, Villanova, Providence and Seton Hall—should split off on their own. They could look to join with the Atlantic-10, a conference that just added Butler, to form a new geographically-connected Big East, located almost entirely east of the Mississippi River.
Either that, or they can simply watch as more and more programs come and go and the Big East becomes more and more of a joke. Whether you think it's a failed experiment or just going through growing pains, we can all agree on one thing: nobody wants to have to bring The University Of Phoenix into all this.
