The Big East made its split official yesterday, with seven basketball schools breaking away from the football-playing members in a deal that takes effect on July 1.
Commissioner Mike Aresco told the Associated Press the seven Catholic schools which are leaving to form a basketball-centric conference — Georgetown, St. John’s, Providence, Seton Hall, Villanova, Marquette and DePaul — will get the Big East name, along with the opportunity to play their league tournament in Madison Square Garden.
The football members, most of which are newcomers to a conference that has been ravaged by realignment, get a cash haul of roughly $100 million. That group includes just one founding Big East member — Connecticut — and will have to find a name for what is essentially a new league.
“It’s been an arduous four months but we got to the right place,” Aresco said in a phone interview. “I think both conferences have good futures.”
Aresco said the football schools have not chosen a conference name and there are no favorites yet. “We can get on with reinventing ourselves and re-establishing our brand,” he said.
The settlement will bring the Big East back to its origins. When it was formed in 1979, it banded together a group of mostly small, mostly private schools located in and around Northeast cities.
“I don’t mean to speak for all seven schools, but the schools that are breaking off, we’re excited to start a new chapter,” said Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson III.
The football conference now known as the Big East will consist next season of Connecticut, South Florida, Cincinnati, Temple, Rutgers and Louisville, along with incoming members Memphis, Central Florida, SMU and Houston.
Rutgers and Louisville will likely be playing their last seasons in the conference before switching leagues, to the Big Ten and Atlantic Coast Conference, respectively.