Sports

Big East turns back to its basketball roots

It seems proper this morning to go back to the beginning, to go back before the beginning. This was 1975 or so, give or take, and Dave Gavitt was having one of his periodic telephone conversations with Frank Rienzo, a couple of athletic directors talking shop.

And trying to peer into the future.

Providence and Georgetown were a lot like many Catholic schools up and down the Eastern corridor: fiercely independent, fiercely devoted to college basketball, and decades removed from the folly of football. By 1975, only three Catholic colleges still played Division I-A football: Notre Dame, Boston College and Villanova; by 1980 only the first two remained.

PHOTOS: BIG EAST’S BASKETBALL ROOTS

“Football made no sense for schools like ours,” Gavitt said some years ago, talking about the small idea that had been buzzing inside his brain. “But basketball? Two years before that, we’d been to the Final Four, and we only had 3,000 students. Davidson had half as many, they almost went. St. Bonaventure had gone. You could still be a hell of a basketball school, even within our resources.”

Gavitt smiled.

“But even then, you knew that couldn’t last forever.”

So Gavitt started talking to his friends around the East, to Rienzo at Georgetown and Jack Kaiser at St. John’s, and they talked to administrators and coaches at Seton Hall and Syracuse, and they talked and they talked and it took a few years for anyone to believe it would get serious because, as Gavitt said, “The one thing our schools were in those days was stubbornly independent. Hard to make a league work when everyone wants to be an independent like Notre Dame.”

But Gavitt never stopped talking about it, never stopped selling it, never stopped believing this was where the future was headed, and today we know it was like talking to someone in 1937 or so who believed that this silly invention called television would someday be something big. By 1978, after toying with names like the Seaboard Alliance and the Mayflower Compact, Gavitt came up with a name beautiful in its simplicity.

The Big East.

By 1983, the postseason tournament was selling out Madison Square Garden four nights in a row. By 1985, three of its members — St. John’s, Georgetown and Villanova — qualified for the Final Four. And by 2003, seven of its first eight members had been to a Final Four, four of them winning it.

“Basketball going big, big, big time,” Dick Vitale said in 1985.

That is the Big East so many of us remember, certainly the Big East the core members remember. Of the original seven, only two — Boston College and Syracuse — played big-time football. This was a basketball league. For years, that was enough. For years, the Big East could cede the fall to the monstrosities that football leagues like the SEC, Big Ten and Big 12 had become because it knew that, come winter, the only question every year would be a simple one: Big East or ACC?

That is a Big East that ceased to exist once Mike Tranghese, the former commissioner, made a commitment to strengthen the league’s football profile, a move necessitated by the first wave of conference realignments, at a time when the Big East seemed on the verge of going out of business. For a while there really was some quality football played in the league, and it earned an automatic spot in the BCS rota.

But the fundamental schism between football and basketball schools was permanent. When even a school like Rutgers — with a fraction of the athletic accomplishment of the core schools — winds up in the Big Ten? When a new Big East includes the likes of Tulane and SMU and Houston? The original mission statement has been left on the side of the highway.

So the basketball schools revolted yesterday, decided to take back their history and their destiny. It won’t be a completely clean couple of months — to survive, it means the Big East may well have to plunder the Atlantic 10 in the same fashion in which it has been poached for years, and that could get messy.

But today, for the first time in years, the Big East — or whatever it’s to be officially called in years to come — owns its soul again. It is a basketball conference again. Defiantly so.