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The Boise State Broncos can brag about having a very solid football program that plays on a weird looking field. As far as their hoops program goes, well calling them a traditional powerhouse would be more than stretching it. However the Big East Conference was looking forward to using them, mainly in football, to boost their credibility. Unfortunately for them, Boise State has decided that playing in the Mountain West Conference was a better long-term move. Another university spurns the Big East and another nail in the imaginary conference coffin.
The move comes to the shock of absolutely nobody. The Big East has been dumped more over the last two years than people clicking on the wrong Google search term, relating in unwanted website visits. With Boise State’s departure, the Big East has lost 14 schools over the last two years. That doesn’t count the “awesome” programs they still plan on bringing in, like the Tulane Green Wave.
The Big East is still searching for a new picture-box deal, and with Boise State out of the picture(one of the many reasons), don’t expect them to be offered any long-term or huge monetary kinds of deals from any of the networks. Commissioner Mike Aresco is still clinging to the notion that he can have a marketable football league with a good hoops division. However, with the Catholic Seven also leaving, Aresco and the conference are clearly much closer to death than they are relevancy.
The idea that the Big East is actually the Big East is a funny notion at this point. In two years the conference will have no true holdovers from just a few years back. It’s almost shocking, to the point of inadvertently funny, that the conference is still trying to hold on for life, in any format. The universities that currently plan to limp along with the Big East must be second guessing themselves and wondering if there is a way to return to whatever mid-major they came from.
It’s sad, but true, that the Big East is in a downward spiral towards less than being a mid-major. In fact, they are starting to look more like an NEC level of conference. While there will be debate whether the Catholic Seven will try to take the conference name with them, it really shouldn’t matter. If Aresco and the remaining humdrum universities left in the conference want to keep the name, shame on them. The Big East was born to be a great basketball conference that lived up to its billing for many years. As in most walks of life, the conference got greedy and chased that wonderful football money. Now the conference is dead because of it.
I’m much more interested to see what’s going to happen with the seven schools departing, but it’s going to be interesting to see which death the Big East will face. It could go out in a bang, with the Catholic Seven using whatever kind of legal nonsense to take the “Big East” name with them, making whatever they decided to rename the conference, to ultimately end up being just another okay conference. Or, more likely, it will go out with a whimper. Slowly limping around and trying to garner any kind of national attention while the country points and laughs.
Aresco, network executives see you. They know the conference is in shambles and they aren’t a big fan of schilling out huge amounts of money to air NEC level hoops or Patriot League level football(I know, that’s how bad it’s going to be. Heard Colgate is on speed dial). Let’s do us all a favor and, nobody would blame you, abandon ship while the conference dies. It will save us all the time of watching, reporting, and living through the abomination the Big East has become.
I’m not saying the programs that plan on calling the Big East home shouldn’t carry on together. What I’m saying is they don’t deserve to use the moniker “The Big East Conference”, even if it’s just a shell of a corpse of a once great conference.
Joe covers the Catholic Seven(and will continue to bash whatever the Big East thinks it is) for Rant Sports. Follow him on the social media device known as the Twitter Machine @JosephNardone
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