People blame ESPN for UConn losing out on conference realignment. We live in a blame first culture. Someone has to take the fall. Nevermind how unbelievably complex conference realignment is and all the things which happened:
[ ]UConn went on probation for Nate Miles incident and then later APR ban
[ ]Calhoun's deteriorating health and retirement left basketball program with "unknown future" status
[ ]Pasqualoni hire sucked wind out of football program
[ ]Not a traditional football school
[ ]Other, larger television markets (Maryland/DC, Rutgers/NJ) were chosen for conferences based on pure TV sets
People tend to ignore all that stuff and just blame ESPN for dismantling the Big East, which is not exactly what happened. Yes, ESPN gave more money to ACC to grab teams like Syracuse, Pitt, and Louisville, and why not? They want a better product. Their only allegiance is to their shareholders. They are a publicly traded company and they can't afford to think with anything but the bottom line.
People want to oversimplify and blame ESPN, but the truth is complicated, and has a lot to do with the conference commissioners, the overall chase of the almighty dollar in college athletics (something we are all contributing to), as well as the instability of the UConn program and the lack of football culture at UConn all combined to make a very difficult situation.
But hey, whatever, ignore all that and you get the BY narrative: ESPN took CT taxpayer money to screw UConn because it secretly hates us for being awesome. Makes total sense.
Every time a talking head at ESPN says something unfavorable, it's evidence of this. Nevermind that they're basically all paid to be judgmental hotheads.
