The Yankee Conference consisting of northeast public/state land grant universities, and the Ivy League consisting of those prestigious private universities in the northeast were the two major all sports, including football northeast athletic conferences that co-existed a century ago and through the end of the 1970s and early 1980s.
With the creation of divisions of football, the changes in football scholarships, starting with the Ivies discontinuing scholarships by the late 1950s and the reductions in scholarships based on competition level by the 1970s, implementation of title 9 into athletic departments.... etc. etc. that I"ve written about ad nauseum. The Yankee Conference disbanded, and the Ivy - became the current Ivy league.
Interspersed were the traditional indepedant athletic departments. Syracuse, Boston College, Penn State - built up by Joe Paterno........
Paterno wanted the all sports league at the highest level of competition in the Northeast. It was his goal. Dave Gavitt's basketball league, that rose out of the destruction of the Yankee Conference, and the separation of the Ivy league from the scholarship athletic world, got in the way.
The vote was 5-3. Based on Mike Tranghese's recent talks with NY Times. It would seem that after all these years, he's come out and said that Villanova, St. John's and Georgetown stopped Penn State.
Where would we be? UConn? Had Penn State been admitted with a Notre Dame type membership in everything but football in 1982? Paterno didn't want that kind of deal that Notre Dame got in 1994. But the TV world hadn't been opened up by the supreme court yet until 1984.........Who knows. Hindsight is always 20/20. All that is certain, is that point in time, was a major crossroads, and there have been many, many more since then, where the Big East conference could have gone in a completely different direction than it did up until 2010, when Marinatto began the football directed moves by bringing in TCU.
I don't know if it will be in any of our lifetimes, I hope so, but I do think that Joe Paterno's dream and goal, of a major northeast based athletic conference competing at the highest levels of football, is still possible.
The programs that would create that kind of conference, that could, dominate the national landscape are interspersed now, among the Big East, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 10, and now withe WVU out - the Big 12.
In the meantime, all we do, is continue to recruit, recruit, recruit, and go out and win games against whomever it is that we happen to be scheduling.
