NEW BigEast

[50's PONY]

Big East set to get bigger, better
By RANDY RIGGS
Cox News Service
SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- Another men's Final Four, another Big East Conference team cutting down the nets.

Jim Calhoun's Connecticut Huskies did it Monday night in the Alamodome after dismantling Georgia Tech, just as Jim Boeheim's Syracuse Orangemen did last year in New Orleans and UConn did in 1999 in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The more things change, the more they stay the same?

Not really.

Dramatic change is on the way for the Big East, which celebrated its silver anniversary this year with its fifth national championship in men's basketball. It's fitting, perhaps, since Dave Gavitt founded the league in 1979 for the expressed purpose of creating a basketball power.

The conference has undergone changes over the years, but none as significant as what occurred about a year ago when traditional football powers Miami and Virginia Tech, as well as Boston College, announced they would bolt for the Atlantic Coast Conference. Stunned and angered, the Big East reinvented itself by signing five new members that will make it the biggest and arguably strongest basketball conference when it makes its debut in 2005-06.

Will the addition of current Conference USA schools Louisville, Cincinnati, DePaul, Marquette and South Florida make the Big East, in fact, the best basketball conference of all time? All but South Florida, after all, have played in at least one Final Four. In its new configuration, 15 of the 16 Big East teams will have reached the Final Four at some point in their history.

But can the Big East have too much of a good thing? How many at-large teams will the NCAA basketball committee be willing to invite to the tournament from the same conference?

Inquiring minds all over the East Coast want to know.

"Will we beat each other up so much that some programs could be diminished in the fray because it's such an incredible battle?" UConn's Calhoun wondered. "That's something that really needs to be given an awful lot of thought. It's tough enough right now, I can tell you, to go against the people we have to go against."

Calhoun isn't asking anything that Mike Tranghese hasn't heard from others, or wondered about himself.

Big East commissioner since 1990, Tranghese has been the point man in the league's transformation. In helping create what undoubtedly will be an unrivaled basketball conference, he acknowledges that there are massive issues to be resolved.

"Our coaches understand the league is going to be brutal," Tranghese said. "Sixteen (teams) is a very difficult number to manage.

"In my mind there are two major issues: how to schedule in the regular season and how the NCAA basketball committee is going to treat a conference with 16 teams. They've never had to deal with that before."

Tranghese says he has had brief, informal conversations about the issues facing the Big East with NCAA executive vice president Tom Jernstedt, whom he describes as a close friend. More formal talks will come as Tranghese seeks assurances that the new Big East won't be penalized in the NCAA tournament selection process for having an embarrassment of riches.

Thirty-one conference champions receive automatic bids to the tournament. The 34 other teams -- including one team selected for a play-in game -- are chosen on their relative merits.

"Tom has said to me that the tourney calls for the 34 best at-large teams. If they stick to that, then I'm fine," Tranghese said. "You shouldn't put a limit on the number of teams from a conference. You just shouldn't."

The most teams a conference has placed in the NCAA tournament since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985 is seven. It's happened five times, most recently by the 11-team Big Ten in 2001.

Excluding departing Boston College, eight teams from what will be the Big East family in 2005-06 qualified for this year's NCAA tournament -- UConn, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Providence and Seton Hall from the current membership, and C-USA schools Louisville, DePaul and Cincinnati. Marquette, which played in the 2003 Final Four, was omitted with a 19-12 record.

"You think somebody is going to take nine (teams) from a conference?" Calhoun asked.

Based on what he's heard informally, Tranghese is hopeful the answer is yes.

Much of Tranghese's energy has been devoted to trying to repair the Big East's damaged football reputation with the losses of Miami and Virginia Tech. He was relieved when at a Feb. 29 meeting of the Bowl Championship Series presidential committee, the Big East was guaranteed a spot in the BCS for at least the next four years.

"People try to pigeonhole the league as a basketball league. Well, we're not. We're a league and we play football," Tranghese said. "That's the most critical thing. We don't have anything to prove in basketball. I'm not worried about that. We just have too many things going for us in basketball not to be good."

But there remain some hoops-related questions. One is if the 16-team conference should be divided into two divisions.

"Some coaches would like it, but I think it's difficult and maybe even impossible to do," said Tranghese. "The only way it'll get done is if they give me carte blanche to do it myself and then shut up. I told them I'm not doing it unless everybody agrees to (abide by) what I do."

Tranghese also has told his coaches something else. Get ready for a conference even more Darwinesque than it already is.

"I can't even imagine what our tournament in New York is going to look like," he said. "It is going to be a very difficult league for coaches. It will be a difficult league to rebuild a program in because there are going to be so many people above you."

But Tranghese isn't saying anything that Calhoun and his colleagues don't already know. As he celebrated his second national championship in six years, Calhoun looked to the future with equal parts fascination, anticipation and trepidation.

Calhoun, in fact, recalled an observation once made by John Thompson. The former Georgetown coach had his own idea of the perfect league, and he said it included "five really good teams."

"Then he said we need about four guys we can beat up on all the time so we can have two or three top-10 teams to make our league look good," Calhoun added. "(But) with the new teams coming in, not only will we have a lot of equal teams, they'll be equal at an exceptionally high level.

"That concerns me greatly."

Randy Riggs writes for the Austin American-Statesman.
Email this page to a friend









© 2004 Cox Newspapers, Inc. - The Waco Tribune-Herald

By using this service, you accept the terms of our visitor agreement and privacy policy.
Registered site users, you may edit your profile.

[Duke Blue Blood]

Up