Big East History As the End Looms

Charles Pierce:

As the game was a perfect fractal view of the season, the season, of course, is a perfect fractal view of what's going on in college basketball, generally. The sport has lost its logic. It has lapsed into incoherence, and nowhere more obviously than in the Big East, once the premier conference in the country, and now a listing hulk that everyone expects to be demolished and sold for parts in the very near future. As usual, football is the culprit. Once the league determined that it would have a football conference, it doomed its internal politics because the investment it takes to run a football program always will become the great gravitational center of a sports enterprise. So, now, the big football schools, both the original members like Syracuse and arriviste members like West Virginia, are peeling off to conferences with more money to sling around. The remaining schools are trying to put together what is jokingly called a "Catholic conference" for basketball, but which is still likely to be called the Big East, and the idea is a pretty sound one, especially if they can sign up those heathen bastards from Butler. (There's also some loose talk about Gonzaga, but the idea of mid-February three-time-zones-east road trips should put the kibosh on that pretty quickly, particularly after the weekend we just had.) If you were to take the Catholic schools presently in the Big East — Georgetown, Marquette, Villanova, Seton Hall, Providence, DePaul, and St. John's — and add, say, Xavier, Dayton, Butler, and, what the hell, Saint Joseph's, you would have a serious league, and one that would be united in its history the way that the original Big East was, back in the days right after Kevin Stacom and Ernie D and Marvin ran people off the court, when things all made sense.

The coach of that Providence team was the late Dave Gavitt, and if you want to know why the Big East succeeded, it's because it was the brainchild of the only coach ever to get Marvin Barnes to play for him. After that, wrangling various administrators into a new conference was an easy job. First of all, history always was the foundation of the Big East's original appeal. The schools invited to participate by Gavitt back in 1979 had been playing each other for years, within the semi-formal structure of the old ECAC sectional groupings or as independents. They were a league in all but name and administrative detail. (This was why little Holy Cross also got an invite, which the school turned down, radically changing forever the nature of its intercollegiate athletics, and for the better.) Georgetown played Syracuse for the first time in 1929, Villanova for the first time in 1921, Pittsburgh for the first time in 1911, and Seton Hall and St. John's for the first time in 1909. All the Big East did was to place ancient basketball rivalries into a formal league structure and turn the accumulated enthusiasm the teams all had for beating each other loose on a grander stage. When the league planted its conference tournament permanently in Madison Square Garden, the historical continuum was complete. One Madison Square Garden or another had been vitally important to basketball in the East, for good and ill, for almost a century, and the league tournament became one of the hottest tickets in town.

The high point of the Big East in my opinion was 1985, when they put three of the four teams into the final four, and featured Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullin as the nation's top players.  It only made it better having Villanova, who tied for third in the conference, win the tournament.