Yeah, it got better. While Miami and VT went on a reputation slides (Miami moreso than VT) after their Championship Games as Big East members, the Big East replaced those schools with Cincinnati, Louisville, USF and UCONN (also replacing Temple). WVU took over as the weight bearing football member and found more BCS success than the entire ACC conference combined. UCONN won multiple hoops titles and helped the Big East become the best basketball conference in the country.
The subtractions that really killed the Big East was Syracuse and Pitt - the same wave that UCONN was ticketed out but replaced by Pitt, thanks to Boston College and ESPiN. It was that departure that included a charter member (Syracuse) that created a mass panic by all remaining members of the Big East to find escape pods. It was at that point that WVU, Louisville, UCONN, and Cincinnati started screaming and running along the Titanic deck tops looking for empty spots on fleeing escape vessels. Syracuse was part of an effort by Big East football schools to try to strengthen football. Once ESPiN's lowball offer was turned down, the writing was on the wall and they knew they had to leave. UCONN was the original partner with them but BC objected over turf wars and ESPiN didn't fight too hard for us when they offered up Pitt as a quick Plan B.
The ironic thing is that had the conference's football playing members successfully persuaded the league's hoops-only Catholic 7 schools that football was the pre-cursor to league stability, not basketball, then the Big East could have added a few schools and, quite possibly, been the 5th P and not the ACC. But as we all know, it didn't pan out that way and everyone, including the Catholic 7 dregs like Seton Hall, Providence and St John's, profited except UCONN. The Big East was, by most measurable metrics (bowl records, BCS records, basketball titles, markets), a better conference than the ACC. But the ACC didn't have a Catholic 7 problem and could act unanimously in trying to kill off their top competition. With ESPiN's help, they obviously succeeded.