Rebuilt Big East Get Big Bounce from Football

[TyBull]

Rebuilt Big East Get Big Bounce from Football

Three Unbeaten Teams are in the BCS Equation

by Pete Thamel

Providence, RI, Oct. 31, 2006 -

Down the hall from the home of Rhode Island Philharmonic, in a stale downtown office building, is the headquarters of one of the greatest comebacks in recent college football history.

Three years ago at the Big East office, the situation looked so bleak that Commissioner Michael Tranghese spent three weeks preparing a tactful way to dissolve the conference. The defections of Miami and Virginia Tech to the Atlantic coast Conference in June, 2003 had athletic directors plotting a breakup.

"That was probably the darkest time, only because this thing created in 1979 was going to split," Tranghese said in an interview at his office Tuesday.

Now, it appears, the road to college basketball's national championship will run through the Big East. On Thursday night, No. 3 West Virginia plays at No. 5 Louisville in a conference meeting of unbeaten teams that will help position the winner to play for the Division I-A title.

The turning point on the field came last January when West Virginia upset Georgia in the Sugar Bowl in Atlanta. That gave the Big East a desperately needed credibility boost. but the more intriguing story is off the field where creative scheduling, aggressive marketing, a savvy consultant, strong leadership, and a dollop of luck have transformed the league's fortunes.

From 2003 through 2005, the Big East endured relentless criticism in football, particularly from the Mountain West, for retaining its Bowl Championship Series bid.

This season, however, the Big East has three teams in the BCS top 12, as many as the powerful Southeastern Conference. Rutgers (8-0) is the third conference team behind West Virginia and Louisville (both 7-0). The ACC's highest ranked team is No. 15 Boston College. The Mountain west has no team in the BCS top 25.

"This league is where it is today because of Mike Tranghese," Tom Jurich, the Louisville athletic director, said. "He had a ship with a bunch of cracks in it and not only patched them, but rebuilt it into the envy of a lot of people."

The new big East was formed with breaking up in mind. In the fall of 2003, conference officials decided to reconfigure to an eight-team football league amd a 16-team basketball league. Both have lucrative television deals through 2013.

The meeting that shaped this vision actually happened without Tranghese. In the summer of 2003, Kevin O'Malley, a sports consultant and former executive at CBS, met at the Newark International Liberty Airport Marriott with the athletic directors with the remaining Big East football programs: Boston college, Syracuse, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Connecticut.

O'Malley said the gathering was contentious. Amid talk of the football universities pulling away from the basketball programs, O'Malley said he made a major point: "If they broke up, they were on the verge of taking a precipitous step backwards. They had to step back and ask why they'd do it."

Many of the Big East's assets could be saved, including its automatic NCAA tournament berth, its BCS bid, and some of the country's largest television markets.

"We hadn't been formal and polite, but it was important for them to listen," said O'Malley, who serves as a consultant to several conferences, the BCS, and Notre Dame.

The league pressed on. But after meeting with Cincinnati and Louisville at a Hyatt hotel in Pittsburgh in October, 2003, Tranghese received a phone call from Boston college's president, Father William Leahy, to say that the university would be leaving. That call came on a Sunday. By that Friday, the league's presidents had met with south florida officials at Newark Airport to fill the vacancy.

The next week, Marquette and DePaul, which were known for basketball, were taken aboard to increase the league to 16 members. That was the culmination of five exhausting months.

"Working to rebuild the Big East Conference was one of the most time-consuming and energy-consuming initiatives in more than 11 years of being chancellor here," Mark Nordenberg, Pittsburgh's chancellor said. "And it was also one of the most rewarding."

The league retained its bid in February, 2004, only to endure a year of criticism. Then Pittsburgh was crushed by Utah of the Mountain West in the fiesta Bowl.

"Then the second year comes and before we even played a game,. we got blitzed every day," Tranghese said. "All I told our people was, 'Please don't lash back.'"

Tranghese said he knew respect would come only on the field. It arrived with West virginia's victory over Georgia. From there, the Big East showed its strength in the board room.

O'Malley said that one of the league's strategies was to have its teams play nonconference games against opponents from BCS conferences.

"There's no other standard you can use," he said. "Who's you play and who'd you beat?"

For example, West Virginia has won at Mississippi State, Rutgers has won at North Carolina, and Louisville has won at Kansas State. The big East has six nonconference road victories against BCS conference teams, compared with one for the SEC (Vanderbilt at Duke) and none for the Big 12.

The Big East has also been creative in shocasing itself. After ABC's telecast of last season's triple overtime game between Louisville and West Virginia went to only 11 percent of the country, the league gladly accepted a Thursday night slot on ESPN. Instead of fighting Michigan and Penn state for viewers as Big East teams did last season, the biggest competition for the game Thursday night will be "Grey's Anatomy."

"We personally think Thursday night has developed into the 'Monday Night Football' of college," said Nick Carparelli, Jr., the league's associate commissioner in charge of scheduling. "It's a big event."

The league has devised its schedule so that its top four teams - West Virgnia, Louisville, Rutgers, and pittsburgh - would wait well into the season to play one another. As the top teams have kept winning, the perception of the league has improved.

Compare that with the ACC, which watched its marquee teams, Miami and Florida state, play on the season's opening weekend. That game, a dreary 13-0 victory by Florida State, exposed the flaws of both teams and sent them and their conference into a downward spiral.

The Big East's smarter scheduling has generated television demand for its games. The conference's contract with ABC and ESPN requires that 14 games by league home teams be televised. The league's strong play has Big East teams on track for at least 20 home appearances.

"We've tried to position our games annually where the networks thought we could be the most useful to them, be they on week nights or the right Saturday," said to Odjakjian, the Big east's associate commissioner who is in charge of television scheduling. "That's been critical."

In the next few weeks, the league will probably receive another test as one-loss teams from the SECm the Big 12, the Big Ten attempt to assert superiority over a one-loss Big East team.

Tranghese said he is not too concerned. "I'd be disappointed," he said. "But if the wors thing that happens to the Big East is that we have a 12-0 team who finishes third in the country left out of the championship game, and we play in another major bowl, it isn't so bad."

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[bulls96go]

nice find

[crambone]

yes, nice read.

[GJL]

Good read, this year has really shut up a lot of the critics.  I rarely hear about the Big Least.   Big east Champs WVU 05 LOU 06  USF 07. [smiley=blockhead.gif]

[E.T.]

"We personally think Thursday night has developed into the 'Monday Night Football' of college," said Nick Carparelli, Jr., the league's associate commissioner in charge of scheduling. "It's a big event."

Agree 100% !

Friday's, people talk college football "around the water cooler" and Big East football will be on their minds.

Go BULLS !!!