A Near Era In The Big East?

NYT:

The last time that Louisville and Cincinnati met in a league tournament title game, the Cardinals beat the Bearcats in the Metro Conference final in 1981. The three-decade gap, the defunct conference and the far-flung location of the two teams in relation to Madison Square Garden provided a fitting parallel as the Big East peeked into its future Saturday night.

Billing the game, Louisville Coach Rick Pitino proclaimed, “Conference USA has come to the Big Apple.” That notion will be even more true as stalwarts programs like Syracuse and Pittsburgh exit the Big East and ones like Houston and Central Florida enter......

In the first meeting in the Big East tournament final of a pair of teams that were not original Big East members, the most notable items may have been the unsightly uniforms or the bizarre feel in Madison Square Garden.

While the game had been long sold out and the seats eventually filled in, the atmosphere lacked the partisanship created by more traditional and local Big East teams like Connecticut, St. John’s and Villanova.

“My thing was it felt so different when the game ended,” the ESPN commentator Jay Bilas said. “It’s not going to be the same again.” He added about the league’s future, “It will be really good, but it won’t be as great.”

With West Virginia gone after this season and Pitt and Syracuse expected to leave after the 2012-13 season, the Big East will lose more than hallmark programs. While the Big East will likely remain a top-echelon league with programs like Memphis and Temple, it will lose the geography and intimacy that defined the league of Dave Gavitt, John Thompson and Lou Carnesecca. The double round-robin conference schedule has long been gone, as the league bloated itself with teams in order to stay alive and satisfy the monetary pull of football.

Times change, and business trumps tradition in sports, as in the rest of life.  I'll make a guess that of all the changes which bother traditionalist conservatives these days, the end of the old Big East doesn't make the list.  This is a loss to those on the Northeast Corridor, and the changes started when Boston College went to the ACC.  Yet, it's good to see somebody complain about a loss of a tradition, even if it is only a 30 year-old tradition.  Cincinnati and Louisville, on the other hand, have seen a raft of conference changes, from the Metro to the Great Midwest to Conference USA to the Big East.  Change is pretty common for those guys.