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Message: [QUOTE="oldude, post: 2048906, member: 7511"] Growing up in CT, I remember when UConn was part of the old Yankee Conference. For most of their history, they weren't even the best football program in the state of CT. That distinction went to the Yale Bulldogs. I remember attending games at the Yale Bowl with 80,000 fans watching Carm Cozza's Eli pummel some hapless opponent. The Yankee conference eventually broke up with most of the schools now located in the CAC, maybe the best football conference in the FCS top to bottom. Vermont dropped football altogether. UConn became part of Dave Gavitt's wonderful experiment with the Big East, creating a basketball conference that rivaled the powerful ACC for supremacy in college basketball. No less than 4 of the original Big East teams won national championships, with UConn winning championships in both men's & women's basketball. Somewhere along the line, for a number of reasons, the Big East morphed into something other than a basketball conference. As it added schools it also became a football conference. IMO, in so doing the Big East sowed the seeds of its own demise. The Big East never made sense as a football conference. You had traditional football powers like Syracuse & Pitt that had both won national championships that featured Heisman trophy winners. You had other schools that played football, like Georgetown & Villanova, but at the 1AA level, and you had some schools that didn't play football at all like St. Johns & DePaul. UConn made a calculated business decision to upgrade their football program to the FBS level. They built a stadium and invested millions of dollars of the state taxpayers money in the program. They achieved a modicum of success, but when the conference realignment began in earnest, UConn was late to the dance and ended up without a partner. I acknowledge that there are lots of reasons why UConn was not offered membership in any of the P-5 conferences, but the biggest reason, IMO, was the fact that they never established the football team as a viable, big-time program with significant revenue potential. Had they done so, The UConn WBB team would now be atop the ACC or BIG, instead of the AAC, and they would still be the darlings of ESPN. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

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