This complaint is likely all for naught - if Tom Luicci is reporting that the Big East plans to double its football exit fee and invite six new members, then that certainly is what going to happen barring any last-minute setbacks. However, that does not mean that the six remaining Big East football programs are making the right call. Even if the most likely scenario is a split and divorce from the non-football programs, any pain would be worth it if only to have a league that puts football first, and in proportional perspective to its relative financial importance. That would be true stability. Forcing two sides that hate each other to remain collegiate is most assuredly not, with every remaining party's loyalty in question, and ready to bolt at a moment's notice. Thirty years of unfair, self-serving decisions, and now "loyalty" suddenly matters to the powers that be in Providence.

It's not that committing to Big East football is necessarily a problem - that is a disappointment no doubt, but it's one we can live with for the time being. No, the troublesome aspect of the deal is that the remaining Big East football programs are still forcibly linked to eight athletic departments that do not play Big East football. Those eight athletic departments threatened throughout all of the past week to split off into their own conference, and yet  will not have to pay one penny more in increased exit fees. That is understandable in the sense that they have limited options, but is not exactly the smartest plan with Notre Dame wary about being stuck in a "Catholic League" with seven other athletic departments falling behind in the athletics arms race due to not having access to football television revenue. Especially considering the persistent rumors that eventually the super conferences will secede from the NCAA.

The six remaining schools would surely benefit from a split. All bring considerable value to the conference, which cannot be said for all of the basketball programs, who continue to interfere in Big East football's ability to thrive. Like it or not, college football obliterates college basketball when it comes to the television revenue calculus. That is why, as paradoxical as it may sound, the Big East football programs may be better off in with their presumed new lineup than with the old one - it's debatable, but not completely implausible. Basketball, on the other hand, is going to take a gigantic hit from not having Syracuse and Pittsburgh on board. This is why it remains as imperative as ever for the Big East to not jump at the first deal ESPN floats over the next few months, and wait for the contract to expire so Versus can jump into the bidding. That is the scenario Providence and its ilk fear the most (more than getting the heave-ho), as the conference's stark revenue disparity will grow even more pronounced.

Continue reading this post »

Count Greg Schiano among the befuddled.

"Close practice. I would like to think you don’t have to close practice, that your beat guys are going to keep it under a lid. But that’s his call. It isn’t mine," said Rutgers coach Greg Schiano.

Let's recap.

• Syracuse coach Doug Marrone closed practice for the first time all year this week, which didn't make the media very happy. The Orange have a lot of injuries, but that's been a problem all year; heck, it's been a problem for the past few seasons now following the giant housecleaning after Marrone first took over.
• Syracuse is letting their students in to this game for free, which they do not normally do. There are also numerous promotions to give away tickets. Both aren't particular novel in a vacuum, and are certainly warranted as measures to rebuild attendance, but against Rutgers of all teams? This phenomenon has been ongoing for the past few years, which is very strange and uncommon.
• Syracuse is promoting the game as New York's College Team Day, just as they did two years ago when Rutgers last visited the Carrier Dome. The amount of consideration given to Rutgers football is, well, flattering? Wildly disproportionate? Doesn't every Syracuse fan think Rutgers football is horrible and will lose in a blowout this weekend? Why aren't they rioting in the streets of Elmira in protest?

Steve Politi thinks the Rutgers football program deserves some of the blame for the athletic department still seeming to be stuck in limbo (unless the Big XII comes calling) in conference reshuffling. It's correct that if Rutgers hadn't underachieved the past few years, they would be in a much better position. They clearly do not have total control over their own destiny. However, Pittsburgh and Syracuse haven't exactly lit the league on fire during the same time span. Syracuse has been, on average, the worst football team in the Big East post-ACC raid. Rutgers was more successful than Pitt in league play from '05-'08 (17-11 vs. 14-14), and in fact won the second-most league games after WVU in that period. Tthe regrettable Kirk Ciarrocca tenure skewed things in Pitt's favor (21-21 vs. 24-18) when adding in the past two seasons.

Rutgers football has technically been around longer than anyone else, but the program wasn't competing at the equivalent of the FBS level until the late 70s. Like it or not, they're more at the mercy of small-sample size blips than most other programs around the country are. Football is driving conference expansion, but that is as a proxy for television contracts, and different leagues have different priorities. Pittsburgh was clearly an attractive expansion candidate in a vacuum, but added little value to the Big Ten due to Penn State already being a member. West Virginia makes some sense for the SEC (as would Louisville, if not for Kentucky blocking their path to membership.) If the Big East's all-sports programs didn't hold inherent value, there wouldn't be so many television dollars up for grabs. Contrary to public perception, everybody isn't merely jockeying for the last warmed-over steak at the local Sizzler's buffet here.

Continue reading this post »

Big East commissioner John Marinatto is claiming that everything is hunky dory in Big East land, even though that is clearly a lie, with UConn still hellbent on bolting the conference. Rutgers and West Virginia are not saying anything publicly, but they can't exactly be happy after spending months trying to ouster Marinatto. Now, with leverage fading (the Pac-12's wariness of the Longhorn Network scuttling, again, the giant domino scenarios), could the regime of Marinatto and his confederates be more emboldened than ever to exert total control?

Staying in a hybrid league is not going to work. UCF and Houston are arguably viable candidates, but ECU is sketchy, and Memphis holds little appeal on the football end, which should be driving expansion. Once again the league's divided loyalties are blinding it to the best possible options. UCF is a on the table despite its overlap with existing member USF, but Temple isn't even going to be considered thanks to the presence of Villanova. The football/hoops double standard still exists clear as day, which only underscores why the football schools need to put the kibosh on this arrangement. This supposed grand compromise is rotten, and with UConn exposing Marinatto as a fraud almost immediately, we now all sit waiting for the worm to turn once again.

If the Big East football programs can split, thereby jettisoning Marinatto (hey, Oklahoma made firing Beebe a condition of saving the Big XII) and the non-football schools, they still end up ahead. They lost Pitt and Syracuse, but both are at least replaceable in football, and losing the eight non-football schools is a huge net positive on the whole. Plus, there's still the whole Versus card to play in a year. If they stick together however, it's a lose-lose proposition for all - the Big East is still unstable, ripe for another round of chaos at the whims of more powerful actors, and always will be when they still think federated members is a remotely realistic option (well, at least we saw more insight yesterday as to why Bob Mulcahy was inexplicably obsessed with scheduling the service academies.)

Update: missed this USA Today report from overnight. Marinatto wasn't just fibbing, there was little truth at all to his statement of unity. Everyone is still looking for the exit.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a Rutgers fan that did not think Mike Tranghese's interview on WFAN today with Mike Francesa was anything other than the conflation of two of the most bloviated, self-important figures in all of sports; mind-melding in a perfect symmetry of factual errors, inconsistencies, hot air, and the most controversial opinions and commentary 1987-era talk radio has to offer. Yes, we get it. Fossilized Mike Francesa is set in his ways, so to say. Francesa literally said that he outsourced all of his opinions about college sports to Mike Tranghese and Dave Gavitt because they took his side in a dispute with the NCAA.

All Francesa cares about is who St. Jawn's is playing at the Gahden, and that's after largely ignoring college sports for the better part of the past decade. Who ever heard of a sports talk radio host who doesn't actually like debating sports? After multiple callers attempted to argue Francesa's points this afternoon, he repeatedly cut them off; ultimately declaring that "nobody cares about Rutgers! Rutgers is not a pimple on anybody's rear end!" Considering that about half of the WFAN staff consists of Rutgers alumni, he might want to hire a professional diet coke taster for the next few days.

More worthy of vilification is former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese. The biggest Big East critics, the ones who think Marinatto is the antichrist, plausibly could not have made up these quotes in their wildest fantasies. They would have been dismissed as unrealistic, too biased, too negative. But here's Tranghese, out and confirming that only cares about Providence College, he always only cared about Providence College (referring to PC as "us" and "we" throughout the interview), and he has zero concern over the nine all-sports Big East members imperiled the the disastrous tenure of Tranghese and his hand-picked successor, John Marinatto. Tranghese just went on New York City sports radio and shilled like a televangelist for donations for a small university in Rhode Island that bears the brunt of the responsibility for destroying the Big East.

Continue reading this post »

John Marinatto did not know that Pittsburgh and Syracuse were leaving for the ACC until Brett McMurphy told him, but that did not stop Marinatto (or a close underling) from feeding McMurphy more supposedly anonymous quotes, as he has for months.

What's most troubling to Big East officials is that Pittsburgh chancellor Mark Nordenburg is the chairman of the Big East's executive committee. Nordenburg also "put the brakes" on accepting a $1.3 billion media rights deal from ESPN this spring. Now Pitt is gone to the ACC. "It's sort of like the fox in the hen house," a Big East source said. 

Pete Thamel has been talking to the same noted golfer.

But the Big East passed on a television contract that would have put it on the same financial plane as the A.C.C., and must now regret that decision. Big East officials are irate that Pitt led the charge (with Rutgers close behind) to reject that deal, meaning it jeopardized the league’s security in both the short term (by leaving) and in the long term (by helping shoot down a lucrative contract). 

What a load of crap. After the football schools basically told Marinatto to get out of the way, he publicly praised the decision to wait as potential bounty for the league. The ACC is locked in at a 12-year, $1.86 billion deal - paying teams at thirteen million per year, the contract looks wildly undervalued only a year after being signed. The prospect of paying Big East teams eleven million per year, when Versus was willing to push the Big East past the ACC, was pure lunacy. Of course Marinatto and his cronies wanted to take the deal. Not only do they not care about football, which was driving the revenue boost, but they actually feared the eight/nine Big East football teams being flush with football cash. The proposal way in no way acceptable, and wouldn't have been worth the paper it was printed on after multiple teams left.

Continue reading this post »

Keeping the Big East football programs under their thumb in perpetuity was never going to happen. Instead of a light touch, the Providence cabal went in whole hog, perhaps rightly recognizing that they were in no way viable without the undermining half of the league at every opportunity. The eight dwarfs forced an incompetent John Marinatto onto the conference as commissioner, and were determined earlier in this year to not only shoehorn an inept Villanova football program into the conference (aided by a generous subsidy from the other football teams.) As such, Pittsburgh and Syracuse are now flirting with (who else), the ACC, acting presumably in preemptive measures to stave off a looming SEC raid. Guess that talk of raiding Maryland/BC or of colluding with the ACC will all be for naught.

They may be greedy, short-sided, and pathetic, but they were not necessarily stupid; that power play, along with a single-minded determination to sign with ESPN for pennies on the dollar were surely motivated by the fear that this precise scenario would play out. They wanted to lock in one last payday for basketball, with zero concern about upping football revenues through competitive bidding. So no, this isn't BC-esque treachery.The Big East forced Pittsburgh and Syracuse's hand, just as they forced the hand of the six other football programs that would bolt from the conference like rats off a sinking ship. It's no indictment of Big East football. The parties involved made the best of a bad situation considering they were being sabotaged and undermined at every turn from internal enemies.

The Big East isn't dead yet, but with the Big XII on life support, any looming speculators will inevitably start moving on to the next-weakest party. If Eastern Football (tm) is to survive in some form, the eight football schools need to act immediate to force a split in the conference and expand. The ACC is locked into a crummy television deal. The Big East is the only property hitting the market soon, and that makes adding a Kansas or Missouri realistic and feasible in a conference not run by leaders actively rooting against football. Such an all-sports conference  would have legitimate negotiating leverage over possible television partners if they added more game inventory, and that remains the only hope if these rumors are true. Maybe, just maybe, this is one last power play to force the issue to a headway. Marinatto has to go and the conference has to split, and these headlines may be the last, best, only hope to force change before it truly is too late.

Update: according to Brett McMurphy, who's practically been a mouthpiece for Marinatto over the past year, Syracuse and Pittsburgh are gone. That's what'll happen when you run the conference as a dictatorship, with half of the members having no say and completely subservient to the other half.

As a whole, the Big East conference does not look to be good this year. There may be one or two decent squads at the top, but a disappointing week two points towards 2011 being a continuation of last season's futility. Syracuse and Pittsburgh barely survived FCS opponents, with West Virginia trailing at the half against Norfolk State (even Rutgers in 2010 wasn't that pathetic!) before pulling away. Those three stooges pulled out victories however, and remain undefeated, so they on some level remain above criticism at least for the next week. When it comes to truly terrible football, it's a two-team race to the bottom between Connecticut and Louisville. UConn just had a close road loss to a BCS conference team, while UL struggled in week one against a FCS opponent. However, the future for the latter program looks considerably brighter than it does for the former.

As discussed yesterday, Louisville at least kind of has an excuse. They're really young, and FIU might be relatively good for a mid-major. UConn, not so much. An athletic director months away from being fired pulled Paul Pasqualoni out of the mothballs after Randy Edsall high-tailed it out of town. Edsall left an unmitigated disaster at quarterback for his successor after dismissing Cody Endres from the team last fall. The Huskies are thin at running back following Robbie Frey's transfer, and wide receiver is about as bad at quarterback. At two critical offensive skill positions, the Huskies are not equipped to compete at the bowl subdivision level. 2011...is going to be a long season in Storrs, and Pasqualoni will immediately be on the hot seat if the new athletic director wants to put his own stamp on the program.

It's not Johnny McEntee's fault that he completed 10 of 27 passing attempts last night, for 99 yards, zero touchdowns, and three picks. He's a walk-on, with no one to catch the ball. Comatose UConn offensive coordinator George DeLeone was practically ran out of town in Syracuse a decade ago, and makes Pasqualoni look like a vibrant spring chicken in comparison. It simply cannot be possible that DeLeone gave McEntee the starting job as the result of a 4:50 YouTube video. Even he's not that far gone (yet.) No; to The UConn Blog's great consternation, McEntee is starting because the only other "viable options" are true freshman Michael Nebrich and redshirt freshman Scott McCummings.

Pasqualoni and DeLeone may well be correct in believing that McEntee gives them the best chance to win in 2011. They just happen to have no viable options on hand. If the duo had job security, they'd write off 2011 now and throw one of the kids into the fire. With their job security tenuous at best from day one, and now scorching as a result of the search for the new athletic director, now their backs are against the wall. Damn the future of their program, they will now do everything in their power to increase their 2011 win total with zero regard for any possible consequences. It's a defensible strategy in the sense that UConn still has a viable offensive line and defense, but if you can't score points, or even keep the offense on the field, eventually that defense will tire out and break down due to exhaustion. (See: 2005 Syracuse, 2010 Rutgers.) It's thin line between first and worst in the Big East conference, and UConn's 2011 season may well literally exemplify that principle.