UCONN Football is in limbo right now…and hurting. Many years ago, I wrote an article in which I said that have Dave Gavitt been alive and still involved with the Big East Conference, which he created, he would have NEVER allowed ACC Commissioner Swofford to swoop into the league and steal several of our most prominent football schools.
At the time, the Big East was on its way up. It had already proven that it was the BEST Basketball Conference in the country (surpassing the ACC), and it was poised to become a power house football conference as well….had the schools stayed together. Somehow it is my belief, that Gavitt would have found a way to keep everybody home while negotiating a sufficient media package for the league. The trick would have been figuring out how to divide the revenue amongst the All Sports schools, and those that were primarily Basketball. My thoughts at the time were: We had BC, Syracuse, Pitt, Miami (all who had won National Titles), and other schools who were good and getting better. We could have made it work so that Big East Football would have become the SEC of the North. That squeeze on the ACC is what seemingly Swofford feared. Now, the league is back to being Basketball with schools like UCONN hurting because they can’t get into a Power 5 Conference. The ACC once considered UCONN but was hindered by the President of BC who voted against it. The Big Ten considered UCONN but then when Maryland wanted out of the ACC they decided to take Maryland instead. Then, the next consideration went to Rutgers instead of UCONN. More recently, it was suspected that UCONN would finally get the invite from the ACC but then the collapse of the PAC-12 and the chance to get Stanford and an SMU team that doesn’t want any revenue money for a number of years put UCONN again on the outside looking it.
At this moment, if someone could speak with all the former Big East Football schools and come up with a plan to form a league, and get a commitment from each of the schools to join, we could build a Power Conference that could challenge any of the others. It would also re-energize programs like Syracuse, BC, Pitt, Miami that have lost their luster since leaving the conference. We might initially need a lot of support from Alumni, Supporters to get it started, but it wouldn’t take long before the value of the league would be recognized and the media contract money would begin to flow.
UCONN Football is in limbo right now…and hurting. Many years ago, I wrote an article in which I said that have Dave Gavitt been alive and still involved with the Big East Conference, which he created, he would have NEVER allowed ACC Commissioner Swofford to swoop into the league and steal several of our most prominent football schools.
At the time, the Big East was on its way up. It had already proven that it was the BEST Basketball Conference in the country (surpassing the ACC), and it was poised to become a power house football conference as well….had the schools stayed together. Somehow it is my belief, that Gavitt would have found a way to keep everybody home while negotiating a sufficient media package for the league. The trick would have been figuring out how to divide the revenue amongst the All Sports schools, and those that were primarily Basketball. My thoughts at the time were: We had BC, Syracuse, Pitt, Miami (all who had won National Titles), and other schools who were good and getting better. We could have made it work so that Big East Football would have become the SEC of the North. That squeeze on the ACC is what seemingly Swofford feared. Now, the league is back to being Basketball with schools like UCONN hurting because they can’t get into a Power 5 Conference. The ACC once considered UCONN but was hindered by the President of BC who voted against it. The Big Ten considered UCONN but then when Maryland wanted out of the ACC they decided to take Maryland instead. Then, the next consideration went to Rutgers instead of UCONN. More recently, it was suspected that UCONN would finally get the invite from the ACC but then the collapse of the PAC-12 and the chance to get Stanford and an SMU team that doesn’t want any revenue money for a number of years put UCONN again on the outside looking it.
At this moment, if someone could speak with all the former Big East Football schools and come up with a plan to form a league, and get a commitment from each of the schools to join, we could build a Power Conference that could challenge any of the others. It would also re-energize programs like Syracuse, BC, Pitt, Miami that have lost their luster since leaving the conference. We might initially need a lot of support from Alumni, Supporters to get it started, but it wouldn’t take long before the value of the league would be recognized and the media contract money would begin to flow.