As I write this, the final twenty minutes of the Big East men's college basketball championship are about to be played, and it's probably fitting that the head coaches of both schools are two old friends and opponents. Jim Boeheim was the head coach at Syracuse when it agreed to join the new conference being created by a number of Catholic basketball powerhouses in 1979. Rick Pitino, now coach of the Louisville Cardinals, who trail at half by 13 points to Boeheim's Orange, was coach of Providence in the mid-eighties, and took a team to the Final Four in 1987. But both Boeheim and Pitino will be leaving the Big East, eventually landing in an expanded Atlantic Coast Conference, a basketball power with several excellent football programs. And the Big East, which has always been first and foremost a basketball-dominant conference, will be broken down and rebuilt.
I won't spend a lot of time on the history of this conference; you can find many places to look for such stories. And of memories, here's a nice one about one moment back in 1987, the year St. John's Walter Berry seemed to come from nowhere to block Syracuse's Pearl Washington to preserve a conference title for Lou Carnesecca's Redmen (now called the Red Storm). I'm just speaking as a guy who came of age in the heyday of the Big East, who spent four years at one of its schools watching some great players, and how disappointing it is to see it all in pieces.
I've had associations with three different Big East schools. My brother went to St. John's, and I remember how thrilling their unexpected run to the Elite Eight was in 1979, featuring a win over Duke in the regional semifinals. That was the last season before the Catholic school from Queens got together with Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall, Boston College, the University of Connecticut, and Syracuse to form the Big East, whose primary sport would be basketball rather than football. (Getting Syracuse to join was a big deal; they had a successful football program with a new facility, the Carrier Dome, and some fairly impressive history: Jim Brown played there.) A few years later, three Big East teams were in the Final Four. I went to college at the University of Pittsburgh, which joined the Big East in 1982. Many an uphill walk I took to the Fitzgerald Field House to watch the Panthers play in and out of conference games. We had one year where we could have made some noise, but lost to Will Purdue's Vanderbilt team. I worked at Seton Hall University a few years ago, long after most successful years in the late eighties, but the team could still fill the Prudential Center in nearby Newark.
The in-conference rivalries were fierce ones, the most famous being Georgetown-Syracuse, but I know that when it came time to the NCAA tournament, I wanted all the Big East teams to do well. Pitt and West Virginia were rivals in football more than basketball; I wouldn't like to lose to the Mountaineers on the hardwood, either, but come March, you want all the kids to go out and represent. And boy it seemed like they all could. In its relatively short existence, the Big East managed to win 6 NCAA titles, and five championship runners-up.
There are a lot of important players in the success of the Big East. Boeheim's teams have been models of consistency over his legendary career. John Thompson and Lou Carnesecca had great battles with their top teams, including a famous game in 1985 when St. John's was Number 1 hosting Number 2 Georgetown at Madison Square Garden, and Thompson came out wearing a copy of Carnesecca's famous lucky sweater. (It was about three sizes large, of course.) UConn's hiring of Jim Calhoun in 1986 changed the entire future of the University, not just the basketball program: Calhoun won three national titles, and his counterpart on the women's basketball side, Gino Auriemma, has had even greater success. But put all the big movers and shakers aside, including founder Dave Gavitt, the conference's first commissioner. The most important decision made to join the Big East was made by an 18-year-old Jamaican-born kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
When Patrick Ewing signed his letter of intent to go to Georgetown in 1981, the Big East was destined to be on the map. Ewing played four seasons there, and in three of them the Hoyas were in the championship game, winning once in 1984. He was a defensive force; in the 1982 final against North Carolina, the Tar Heels' first two baskets were actually goaltending calls against Ewing. The Hoyas have had some good teams since Ewing went on to a Hall of Fame career in New York, though they have never dominated the conference as they did.
The Big East had a few expansions and shakeups in the past decade, and it was hard to follow the conference with 16 teams in it, as what happened in 2005. Ultimately the difficult relations between the schools with football programs and those without them broke under the pressure of television money, which is driven by the latter despite the enormous popularity of March Madness. Syracuse and Pitt's decision to leave the conference sealed its fate. Other football schools followed, joining wherever they could. The "Catholic 7" schools that remain -- original teams Providence, Seton Hall, Georgetown, and St. Johns, along with 1980 joinee Villanova and 21st-century members DePaul and Marquette -- have secured the rights to the name "Big East" and will form a basketball conference for the upcoming season, with the remaining teams who have not yet fled elsewhere creating a new conference. It may be great for those teams, and maybe they will matter again as they once did, in my youth, but it won't be the same.
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