Time To Break Up The Big East

The other night as I sat down to watch the Notre Dame/Pittsburgh basketball game, I was hoping for a close game, but went in fully expected Pittsburgh to pull away in the second half. While Pittsburgh is ranked #16 in the nation, Notre Dame has had a fairly unspectacular year and was missing their best player. Should have been a fairly simple win for the Panthers... so, of course, the Irish won by 15. It's just the kind of loss that has come to signify the Big East conference this year, which is why it occurs to me that the Big East can't keep going like this. It's too big, too crowded and too full of solid teams. It can't survive if they keep this up. They need to cut some of these teams out for everyone's sake.

The problem is that merely being a good team isn't enough in the Big East. You have to be great or you will never make it through conference play. Just look at the Irish - of their 10 losses, 8 have come in conference. Barring a shocking run in the Big East tournament, they won't make the NCAA tournament, but it's possible that two A-10 teams could be invited to March Madness even though both of them would likely finish in last place in the Big East. #13 Georgetown, which ran Duke (arguably the best team in the ACC) off the floor, currently sits 6th in the Big East, behind a Marquette team that isn't even ranked. UConn beat then-#1 Texas, but sits just ahead of the Irish with 11 losses, 8 of which were in-conference. The teams are just cannibalizing each other.

By creating this sort of Super-Conference for basketball, all they've done is make sure that no team can get through the season with a record good enough to secure a top seed in the NCAA Tournament. Just two weeks ago everyone thought Villanova was a lock for a #1 seed, but they've suffered a couple of in-conference losses since then and aren't even first in the Big East. No one can keep up a level of sustained success when there are 12 games against Top 25 teams on your schedule. Now, ideally they would get down to 12 teams, but let's start slow and get rid of two teams. My first candidate? Louisville.

Frankly, don't even know why Louisville wants to be in the Big East. First off, I don't know how good you may be at geography, but they are decidedly not East. They have to have huge travelling costs with having to continually go to Pennsylvania and New York. Secondly, when they had their best success in football it was the Bobby Petrino run-and-gun style, which doesn't work when you're play in the Northeast and facing snow, wind and temperatures in the 30s. Don't you think Cardinal fans would be much happier taking Arkansas's place in the SEC (Arkansas jumping to the Big 12 to replace Missouri, who jumps to the Big 10), where they can cultivate the awesome Louisville/Kentucky rivalry twice a year?

Next I was going to suggest South Florida, but we can't kick out two schools that have football teams, because realistically every conference is trying to get to the magic number of 12 for a Conference Championship game. Instead, how about Seton Hall? They're sort of in the same boat as Marquette - good not great, but can get on a good run and make some noise. The problem is they just can't do it consistently enough. They would, however, do very well in the Atlantic 10. They could cruise to an automatic NCAA bid almost every year. It's a much easier path.

So, that's my suggestion to start with. The conference is still loaded so they can still claim to be the best basketball conference, which makes everyone remaining in the Big East happy. Louisville get to market a great rivalry and save on travel costs and Seton Hall can be a perennial contender for the NCAA tournament. Now we just need the rest of the schools in the Big East to agree with me.