Billy,
I'm sorry if you take offense to my comments that may appear as me being unsympathetic to your school's plight, but I am in fact unsympathetic to your school's plight.
Anyone who did not see this as the eventual outcome twenty to twenty five years ago was blind, some were intentionally blind.
Your conference went out of its way, on a few occasions to destroy the Big East and in the process just made the path easier for the B1G and SEC to reach their goals. Your school was complicit and many of the steps that eventually made things easier for the P-2 and the demise of the Pac-12.
We are where we are because a handful of conferences who were not quite at the top tier felt it was better to attack conferences below them than emulate conferences above them. Basically you (the ACC) did a large part of the job the P-2 needed done to achieve their goals.
Oh yes...I have seen this coming from a long way.....when I was in school 55 years ago...it was all about the Big Ten...they had the tradition, the big fan bases. Pre 1984, certain conferences were prioritized with the limited telecasts (ABC had exclusive rights from 1961-1984) You could play out a career at a school like FSU, Southern Miss, Duke, etc and never be seen on TV during the regular season. We listened to games on the radio...
If you think about it, the unfettering of football telecasting post 1984 and the massive turn to funding football in contracts caught many by surprise. The ACC's Swofford said that as late as 1990 basketball brought in more media money to the ACC than football and the ACC was too slow to realize that the tide was turning. Some fans of some schools were dismayed at the hold that basketball schools still held on the conference.
I am not unsympathetic to the Big East...but it was an awkward beast as was/is the ACC...some football schools, some basketball schools, and a bunch of private schools...the ACC was similar....the SEC's Vanderbilt is their only private and Northwestern is the B1G's only private to the ACC's eight privates.
But money was always going to be the determinate of what college football would become...media contracts, and the rapidly changing environment of court settlements and NIL, has created ever widening chasms between programs...Heck, Miami just got a commitment from the top prep OT...at $2 million per year in his NIL, he earns as much or more than 80 NFL offensive linemen.
"what rough beast, it's hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born ? "
www.nytimes.com
www.espn.com
www.nbcsports.com
