Big East football: No longer basketball’s keeper

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“This is a case that involves broken commitments, secret dealings, breaches of fiduciary responsibility, the misappropriations of conference opportunities and predatory attempts to eliminate competition.”

Was that Big East commissioner John Marinatto? Keep guessing. Louisville head coach Rick Pitino? No.

University of Pittsburgh chancellor Mark Nordenberg said that in 2003, when Pitt and four other schools sued Boston College after it fled to the Atlantic Coastal Conference.

Lest we forget, college football disabled the greatest basketball conference in the nation during September 2011.

The ACC accepted Syracuse and Pittsburgh, two of the oldest Big East programs, in that month. The universities will shift after 27 months, per conference rules. West Virginia, the league’s leader in football revenue (over $19 million in 2010-2011), followed the precedent by joining the Big XII. The schools have unalterably damaged the Big East forever, obeying the ritual cult of college football.

“Obviously as my colleagues have all said,” Syracuse president and chancellor Nancy Cantor told ESPN, “we needed to look carefully at the stability for us going forward in terms of us being able to support our athletics department to the extent that gives quality opportunities for our student athletes, and I think that match is just perfect for us.”

Supposedly, this is for the athletes. For the poor athletic departments. For the very stability of the schools.

The Big East, granted, is not a football conference. Seven of its schools don’t even have FBS teams. As such, the eight conference schools that do have bowl subdivision teams earned average revenue of $18.8 million in the 2009-2010 season. That is the lowest of all the other BCS conferences.

To put it simply, joining the ACC means greater television revenues, especially from football. The SEC produces average revenue of $49.9 million primarily because of its dominant football teams (it has a first-tier contract with NBC for $825 million until 2024, and a second-tier one with ESPN for $2.25 billion). Granted, the Big East has not managed its contracts effectively, leaving certain schools to fend for themselves.

The athletic departments of four Big East schools (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and Syracuse) only broke even in the 2009 season. Having only eight FBS schools in a 16-team conference affects negotiating capability; the Big East only has a mere $200 million first-tier contract with ESPN until 2012, as opposed to the ACC, which is negotiating a $1.8 billion contract with the sports network from 2012 until 2023. That is a goldmine for such supposedly spurned schools such as Syracuse and Pitt.

Yet, in this cash register cacophony, one cannot hear the dribble of the basketball. Consider the fact that Syracuse’s basketball program created an $11.4 million profit for the school in 2010. The Orange only reinvested 39.6-percent of that in the earning sport. The football team expended $16.1 million, $8.8 million more than basketball expenses. (As a note, these figures come from university reports to the Department of Education. Schools do not tell the Department how they actually divide the revenue; some break it out by sport, and some simply report general sports revenue as a whole.)

As for Pittsburgh, in the same year, the basketball team earned a $6.4 million profit, and simply broke even for football. The latter team’s expenses accounted for $21.3 million, $14.1 million more than the former’s.

College football is a sport that feeds off of itself and ruins conferences in the doing.

The Big East is a basketball conference, rightfully so. With four schools currently in the basketball top 10, with Syracuse as No. 1, all three transitioning schools should have realized that. Commissioner John Marinatto should have realized that as well. ‘Cuse, Pitt and West Virginia should have allowed their basketball programs to remain.

Of course, I do want to see Syracuse play Duke, and Pitt play North Carolina. These will unite some of the best teams in the country into one conference. but at what cost? We now lose the Syracuse-Georgetown game and the Pittsburgh-Villanova game. We lose them for greater football revenues.

As West Virginia leaves to increase its great revenues, and Syracuse and Pitt vacate the conference that it helped create, the siren song of money beckons their names. With them goes Big East basketball dominance. With them goes basketball as an influential college sport.

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