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Love the honesty from Aresco. IMO, we've taken a step up from old CUSA. Yes, we expected a dozen steps and got one. But a step up. Let's go blow the doors off this league in anticipation of the next expansion in a few years.

I agree that Mike Aresco has been very professional, especially with the hand the BE and he were dealt. I thought the following were quite interesting:

"Sometimes people take advantage of you. We looked at things were happening. I wasn’t happy with the Boise situation (Boise State committed to the Big East and then backed out). They were a bell cow in a way. All of sudden they are making noise they weren’t happy with the deal.

At that point, there a couple of things. What kind of conference do you really want to be?

Once Boise was resolved, it was very clear that San Diego State (another Big East newcomer) wasn’t tenable any more. We had to figure out a nice way to figure that out.

Publicly, we wanted to make the right statements. We wanted to do this in a classy way. This was business."

"Once we got the Catholic 7 deal done, once we got Boise straightened out, that’s when we had an opening to deal with TV.

Obviously the NBC people (who made a credible offer to the Big East) stepped up. They stepped up with a tremendous amount of exposure, which ultimately ESPN matched. Which meant a lot of great exposure on a lot of great platforms."

We have a lot of good things happening, but we are going to have relentlessly tell people who we are. I looked at our non-conference games. I counted 15 games of consequence that our teams can make a mark.