You have to let these things breathe, and in a right-now world we want everything yesterday. We don’t just want HBO; we want HBO On Demand, so we can take comfort in the knowledge that there isn’t a moment when we can’t watch “True Detective.”
You need to let the New Big East breathe. You need to stop comparing 2014 to 1985, stop wondering if this new basketball alliance can ever compare with the old one which we still remember fondly, every year at this time, when everyone gathers at the Garden and squeezes their XXL selves into XL sweatshirts.
Pining for the old days before pondering the new.
Lots of pining at this tournament now.
But consider: The Old Big East, the one you remember so fondly? It wasn’t to the manor born. Dave Gavitt didn’t simply unveil the idea and instantly invent a dynasty. Even the Old Big East needed time to breathe.
“I would like to say that the way the whole idea was hatched in my head, that’s exactly how I envisioned it: Boom, boom, boom, a couple of years we have the whole Final Four,” Gavitt said a few years before his death in September 2011. “We had some great coaches, some great players and some great timing. It was a perfect storm that broke just so for us.”
Even Gavitt, the smartest man in almost every room, didn’t quite know what to expect when he unveiled the Big East (picking that name, thankfully, over other suggestions such as the Seaboard Alliance and the Mayflower Compact).
Legend has it, he could sense the tide turning in TV, but in truth the Big East beat ESPN’s launch by a few months, and even then ESPN was better known for tractor pulls and rugby. Legend likes to put words into Gavitt’s mouth and ideas into his head that simply weren’t logical in 1979.
The eight schools that formed the initial core of the league — Boston College, Connecticut, Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Syracuse and Villanova (which joined in year two) were all nice programs located along the Eastern Seaboard. Many of them had strong historical ties to the NIT but there wasn’t one NCAA champion among them. These were not blue bloods.
From the time the NCAA Tournament was founded in 1939 until the Big East debuted 40 years later, in fact, the eight teams had played a combined 328 seasons and qualified for only 61 NCAA bids among them. Georgetown (1943), St. John’s (’52), Villanova (’71), Providence (’73) and Syracuse (’75) had made one Final Four apiece.
And this wasn’t exactly a gathering of ancient rivals, either. Whatever blood feuds emerged happened after the conference was born. Syracuse and Georgetown had only played a dozen times. St. John’s and UConn had played exactly twice. Villanova’s most bitter feuds were with its fellow Philly Big Five schools.
So the same complaints that echo now were common then, too. Rivalries develop, they aren’t forced. That comes over time. The Big East’s celebrated coming-out season was 1984-85, its sixth year. And it really wasn’t until 1991 when its full impact was felt: Seven out of nine schools earned NCAA bids, including Villanova, which danced despite a 16-14 record; as if to prove that’s exactly how it should be, the Wildcats won a game in the tournament, too.
That was the last year of the Big East As We Knew It; the next season Miami made it a 10-team league, and soon it was 13, then 16, and 15, then 16 again, members coming, members going until this new 10-team league was hatched, a lot of new faces in the house, a lot of people having to remind themselves that St. John’s-Syracuse is a non-conference game, that Louisville-Connecticut and BC-‘Cuse are league games … just in other leagues.
Lots of adjustments. Lots of growing pains. The Atlantic 10, which the Big East raided to fill out its membership, may get as many as six teams in the NCAA while the Big East will be lucky to get four. Maybe that’s an aberration. Maybe that’s the new way of the world.
Point is, on the eve of the first New Big East Tournament, we don’t know. The future is still to be determined.
Gavitt, again, from 2004: “You had to trust that those coaches and those players would take the league where it was intended to go. You couldn’t force that. You could just go along for the ride and hope you landed in a good spot. Eventually, we did.”
And eventually, this league can, too. Let it breathe.