re: 7 Big East basketball schools leaving

Gonzaga, BYU, and st Mary's to join all priests conference.

quote:

---

Those were all just small moves compared to a whole conference dissolving. 7 teams just left a conference....7!! Now the Big East is literally a dead conference. Now the real games begin. Every move up to this point has been nothing compared to whats about to happen. The big shift is about to happen!

---

This. It's going to be interesting to see where everything ends up.

The ADs have really fricked up college athletics. I know it's about the money, but I think I'll look back and consider approx. 2005-2009 to be the Golden Years of college sports. All the leagues made geographic sense and all of the schools within each league seemed similar. I also miss Big East basketball (past tense because it's already dead). 16 teams and 10 of them were legit NCAA tourney teams. It was pretty awesome.

quote:

---

Did you miss it when they joined the West Coast Conference? Because that's exactly what they did.

---

I think BYU realizes that making that move in the current climate is a mistake. Football is still king and I think BYU has enough punch to make it into a legitimate power conference. I see them staying put as an independent or aligning with a bigger conference and bringing all their athletic programs with them. Purely speculation on my part...

They're only independent in football. In everything else, they're in the WCC, a Catholic league. My idea was that they stay there, let the eastern Catholic league get going, and have annual matchups between the leagues.

I saw this on ESPN this morning and I thought it was interesting and relevant to the thread. It's part of Andy Katz' latest blog post, and references ESPNs CBB podcast:

quote:

---

Pitt coach Jamie Dixon also said on the same podcast that he was told the reason Marquette and DePaul were added 10 years ago was to ensure the five Catholic schools had seven members to retain an NCAA bid if they decided to leave. He said the eventual split of football and non-football was always inevitable, and may have actually happened later than predicted.

---

quote:

---

Have you ever seen how dominos actually work? Pretty sure the first one in the set was Nebraska going to the Big Ten.

---

That happened mostly because of the Big XII South and Texas in particular dictating to the rest of the conference, which started with conference alignment and the death of the Nebraska-Oklahoma annual rivalry game.

Since all of that happened because the Texas 4 joined the Big 8, and that happened when the SWC broke up after Arkansas left for the SEC--this all must be Arkansas' fault.

Or going even further back: if Tulane and metro schools hadn't left the SEC, the SEC wouldn't have had an open spot for Arkansas.

This is all Tulane's fault, and interestingly they will end up one of the most screwed in all of this.

quote:

---

Gonzaga, BYU, and st Mary's to join all priests conference.

---

Well, no, but I could see Creighton, St. Louis, St. Joe's or Xavier join the party. Pick three of them and form the Jesuit league.