Realignment: Slamming The Door

This will be my final article on conference realignment for now. The main reason is that I don’t think anything else is likely to happen in the near term but postmortems, and maybe the invitation of Pitt into the Big Ten. The other reason is that, while I’ve managed to draw some good traffic over this issue, I need to shut the rage machine down for a while. I’ll resurrect the travel series I started before first the Iraq war, then the conference wars broke out.

It’s a done deal. Tuesday, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the annual Big East meetings ended a day earlier than planned. (Some indications are that today was actually the original ending day, but plans to extend the meeting were scrapped. Either way, it isn’t good.) Yesterday, Big East Idiot-In-Charge Commissioner Mike Tranghese held a rambling press conference where he blasted Miami, then indicated that he basically didn’t have a clue what to do next. In another article (sorry, no link), he claimed that Notre Dame had been approached for a second time regarding football membership and had again rejected BE overtures. Although formalities will take a while, Tranghese’s last statement, “[M]y five football schools, and my five basketball schools and Notre Dame are going to have to do something if this occurs,” seems to say that he’s resigned to the departure of Miami, SU, and BC.

With the end of the conference, the recriminations have kicked into high gear. Over on TechSideline.com, publisher Will Stewart had been cracking down on posters playing up Shalala’s treachery with comparisons to the dubious integrity of her former boss, Bill Clinton. While holding off from using the C-word, Will broke off a killer blast against Shalala on Tuesday afternoon — and stopped just short of invoking either Clinton or her homosexuality to support a comment about how “[l]oyalty means nothing to Ms. Shalala” (just over a third of the way down).

There’s plenty of blame to throw at Shalala, to be sure, starting with her insistence that Miami wasn’t going anywhere and continuing with her March 2003 acceptance of a nomination to the BCS Presidential Committee as a representative of the Big East! Some message board posters have laid this whole move on Shalala’s social climbing instincts, ascribing to her a desire to hobnob with the academic elitists of the ACC. There’s some of that, sure, but I think she’s more taking (what appears to be) the easy way out of Miami’s fiscal irresponsibility. They somehow managed to lose $1.5 million on athletics even in 2001-02, when they won the football national championship and raked in well over $10 million directly from that win. Other schools have handled major budget deficits differently, by finding ways to cut expenditures — even cutting sports, as in the WVU case Will references. In places like Virginia Tech, many of our non-revenue sports (particularly men’s) operate with less scholarships than the NCAA maximum, in order to both balance the budget and comply with Title IX. Shalala and Miami AD Paul Dee, on the other hand, decided that extorting more revenue out of their targets was a better way to play the budget game than cutting spending and feeling a little bit of pain themselves — a typical Democratic move, if I do say so myself. (How about they feel my pain?!)

The other two schools I have mixed emotions on. Clearly, if VT had received an invitation, we would have jumped, and I would have supported it fully — so it’s tough to cast aspersions without being seen as a bit hypocritical. (A VT departure, though, would not have been nearly as damaging as this raid on two core Northeastern schools who were charter members of the original basketball Big East.) Nonetheless, I’m not happy with BC; their nose has been firmly planted up Miami’s butt throughout the process, going so far as to repeatedly snub overtures by other BE football schools trying to assemble a plan to fend off the raiders. It took them approximately five seconds to jump for joy upon the ACC’s Friday announcement. Syracuse I blame less. By all indications, they don’t really want into the ACC (SU BB coach Jim Boeheim has been particularly outspoken about his desire to remain in a Northeastern league, and SU AD Jake Crouthamel put in long hours at the BE meetings apparently trying to work out a deal), but if protecting their athletic program means that they must go in, then they’ll do it and wash their hands of the whole mess. In a subscribers-only TSL article, Jim Alderson called SU “the first school in the history of the ACC to be issued a membership invitation that it does not desire.”

This is a mess, no two ways about it. In the next few weeks to months you’ll probably see all kinds of stories about large-scale conference raiding. A big 3-way train wreck between the BE, C-USA and Atlantic 10 (with potential incidental impacts upon at least the WAC, CAA, and MAC) seems virtually guaranteed at this point. Out west, the Pac-10 and MWC may mix it up over BYU and Utah, while the MWC continues angling for the automatic BCS bid that it hardly waited for the Big East’s body to cool before trying for. (In my opinion, the MWC has no chance whatsoever.) I used to be convinced Tech and WVU would immediately assemble a hybrid conference with the BEFC’s remainders and the top 4-5 from C-USA; I’m not so sure that’s the best idea anymore, if scheduling as a football independent for a couple of years (with ESPN’s help, for a team likely to be quarterbacked by one Marcus Vick) is at all feasible. Either way, I’m taking some time off the expansion beat for now, and shifting to topics not so close to my heart as the future of my alma mater.

Short update, 11:30 AM: Chas doesn’t think it’s quite over yet. I respectfully disagree, because I just don’t think that, in Crouthamel’s position, I could justify placing Syracuse at risk that way. If, say, Pitt or Rutgers got the ACC-#12 invitation and found a way out of the agreement, or if the ACC invited Louisville, and the BCS bid disappeared anyway, it’d be a disaster for him and SU. (I’m counting BC and Miami gone at this point, and I think the ACC is more likely to invite the University of Alaska at Anchorage than VT now.) As a Hokie Club contributor, I’d demand Jim Weaver’s head if, did we have the option to go somewhere else, he still made an agreement like this and we got screwed because of it. This kind of deal might have worked before anybody in the BE (other than Miami) had a guaranteed way out, but now I don’t see the benefit for Syracuse in limiting its options. I hope I’m wrong.