Except UConn and the State of Connecticut didn’t sue the Big East. We sued the ACC, Miami and Boston College- and we didn’t sue them alone. Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Rutgers and Virginia Tech were also co-plaintiffs (until Tech dropped out after having received an ACC invite). Two of those schools now play in the ACC, so let’s not pretend that the suit is the reason we don’t. It was part of BCU’s reasoning why that school rejected our campaign for membership, but BCU alone couldn’t have kept us out- BCU using game theory to convince Clemson, FSU, et al that first Pittsburgh, and then Louisville, were adequate substitutions for us is why we were left out. Sure, Blumenthal was the responsible party for filing the lawsuit, but the ACC schools- save our friends to the northeast- seem to have gotten over the suit, especially when there was money to be made with us.
The Big East “separation and divorce” had nothing to do with the lawsuit and everything to do with private, northeast, basketball-focused schools not wanting to send their track teams to Dallas for tilts with SMU that they would only have been scheduled for because of football, a sport they don’t care about. The brands of the schools in those far-flung states aren’t powerful enough to retain ties to the league- so they split. Had the Big East brought in the University of Texas instead of the University of Houston, or Louisiana State University instead of Tulane University, the basketball schools would never have left.
I get we might not look wonderful in the eyes of the college sports world, but if we could have helped a conference generate a substantially larger revenue figure than any of the other available schools, we would be in a P5 league today, lawsuit or not.
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