Aresco: ‘We feel we have a very good league’

[Harry]

Q. What’s your level of confidence that the Big East will remain a viable conference?

A. We’re obviously confident. We have 13 very good schools that play football and basketball or football only. East Carolina, in all likelihood, will end up playing basketball as well as football in this configuration. We have Navy, Boise State and San Diego State set to play football only. And we have some significant basketball brands in Connecticut, Cincinnati, Memphis, Temple, South Florida, with Larry Brown at SMU and Houston with historically a terrific program. We think we have a lot to build on in basketball and have always positioned ourselves as having football with significant growth potential.

Q. Officials at Tulane and East Carolina have said they remain enthusiastic about joining the Big East despite the basketball schools’ departure. Are Boise State and San Diego State equally committed?

A. Obviously they are farther away but have been committed to the model, very much so. We’re going to move forward now and work on TV. I asked as commissioner, ‘Do we want to stay together and make this model work?’ And the response has been yes, and they have been very firm.

Realignment is the world we live in now. We know the winds are buffeting everyone, so one hesitates to make predictions. But our group has been firm. We feel we have a very good league. We’ve got some real assets in this league, although we probably have to let people know. When you go through what we’ve gone through, it’s not easy to get the narrative in the place you like it.

Q. Presumably you envision further expansion?

A. We certainly have room, as a 13-team league with Navy coming in in 2014, to add a 14th team. My guess is we’d look west. There are western schools that have asked to join us. I don’t know if we would be a 14- or 16-team conference. Our goal is to hold together. We know realignment may not stop, but you can’t not forge the future because various shoes might drop in realignment. So looking out west — we have a western presence, and it would fit in with our Texas presence. And there are western bowl games that would have an interest in us.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/big-east-commissioner-mike-aresco-we-feel-we-have-a-very-good-league/2012/12/19/2fb80652-4a1e-11e2-820e-17eefac2f939_story.html