Is the Big East too Big for itself?

NT80 · June 1, 2005

Big issues for a big conference

By Mike DeCourcy - SportingNews

If you had trouble getting a hotel reservation last week in or around Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., now you know why. The Very Big East was in town for its annual meetings.

So now that they've learned how to squeeze 16 coaches and athletic directors around a conference table, they'll be working on how to squeeze 16 teams into the same basketball league.

The major issues, from least to most important:

Madison Square Garden's seats for the tourney aren't simply divided evenly among the teams. Each school gets an allotment of tickets -- last year it was 500 -- and can order more. Even though the conference might not put all of its teams in the field, it has decided that all teams -- even the ones that don't get to compete -- will receive their share of tickets.

The tournament field. Because there are 16 teams, it's possible to have a four-day tournament involving all of them. It's also possible that if the league follows that course, it never will have another NCAA champion.

Commissioner Mike Tranghese advocated restricting the tournament to 12 teams and giving byes to the four highest seeds. The coaches opposed that because of self-interest and the possibility that a competent team could finish 13th. But Tranghese is right. If the best teams must play four games to win the championship, they will be at a disadvantage against champions from other leagues.

Scheduling. The league quickly decided to use a 16-game schedule. At this level, playing 18 league games would remove some flexibility to take on moneymaking nonconference home games and probably would lead schools to cannibalize one another in the regular season.

But because the league's TV partners, CBS and ESPN, want access to marquee games, it makes little sense to have all teams play one another once with only a single repeat opponent. Would you rather have one Connecticut-South Florida matchup or two Connecticut-Villanova games? Each team instead will have three repeat opponents and miss playing two league partners each year.

The identity of the repeat opponents has not been determined because TV folks will have a considerable influence. The networks would like to wait until college rosters are safe at last from the NBA draft. Logically, you can figure on Cincinnati-Louisville, Pitt-West Virginia and Syracuse-UConn.

Bids. If it seems there won't be enough NCAA bids to accommodate the deserving teams among 16 Big East schools, maybe it's OK. They're used to it. Since the Big East expanded to 13 teams in 1995-96, the league never has produced more than six NCAA entrants.

But if this Big East were to enjoy a season equivalent to what the Big Ten produced in 2000-01 -- when seven of its 11 teams made it -- it would work out to 10 bids for the Big East. That's nearly one-third of the at-large field, which would be hard for the rest of college basketball to digest -- including selection committee members, regardless of their protests that they pay no attention to conference affiliation.

Tranghese, a former selection committee chairman, emphasizes to coaches the importance of high-quality victories in and out of conference. "I have no reservations whatsoever that if we have a lot of teams that are qualified, they'll all get in," he says.

Whether this will become the Too Big East will be more obvious next March.