"It's now a dog-eat-dog world in college athletics," he said, "and everyone is acting in their own self-interest. It's not about fit or academics or rivalries. It's about football and money, period."

Tranghese said "you can't cast stones" at Pitt or Syracuse because every football school in the Big East "didn't feel secure." He said that through the final years of his tenure in the commissioner's chair, he grew tired of the "belly-aching" from football schools that longed for bigger TV dollars and bowl contracts.

"They simply weren't winning enough games and kept pointing the finger at us to get them more money," he said. "The best way to solve their own problems was to win games, but the Big East hasn't been good enough in football. It was an incredible burden."