It was inevitable.
The philosophical split between the basketball schools of the BE and those for whom football was an important sport led to the BE universe having an inherent wobble.
The Big East was born and raised as a basketball conference, and the reason it failed was that it never understood, or really wanted to understand, that football drives the bus in modern college athletics. And the big voices in the league were basketball guys.
When the BE voted down Penn State, the rift was very clear...the Georgetown AD, Frank Rienzo, stated that football wasn’t helping his cause any so he didn’t care about it and didn’t see how Penn State helped the Hoyas.
It took the losing of Syracuse and Pitt to finally force the basketball-football split that had been brewing for years...there had been talk of splitting the football-basketball programs before but Tranghese worked hard to fight it off.