There was not a lot of love between older VT fans and the Big East. And UConn was pointed out as a VT backstabber.
VT was turned down by the Big East for all sports entry and allowed in for football only in 1990 (and thus not sharing any basketball revenue).
VT never forgot....their allies were Syracuse, Pitt, and Miami (a group that endures) and the basketball schools their enemy.
"But in 1993-94, Virginia Tech was served with a punch in the gut that was one of the darkest days in VT athletics history.
1994: The infamous Big East snub
In late 1993, the conference rumblings started happening again, and this time, they were centered around the Big East. The league started seriously discussing adding their four football-only schools to the conference for all sports, which would mushroom the Big East membership from 10 to 14 schools.
Why did the discussion come up? Two reasons: TV money and possible raiding by other conferences.
The Big Ten, having gained serious TV market share in the east with the addition of Penn State, was talking to Rutgers about the Scarlet Knights becoming the twelfth team in the league. That would help the Big Ten penetrate as far east as New York, and it would also allow the league to split into divisions and play a championship game, a possibility that was unforeseen in the 1989 PSU expansion but which had been put into play by the SEC in 1992, with their first football championship game.
Rutgers as an expansion target sounds laughable, but in 1994, the Knights had a pretty strong football team, and of course they offered that New York/New Jersey TV market, or so it was thought. In addition to Rutgers, the Big Ten as well as the SEC was also rumored to be talking to West Virginia.
On another front, the CFA football TV contracts with the networks were about to expire at the end of the 1995 season, and conferences were beginning to negotiate their own TV deals, to take effect with the 1996 season. The CFA’s contracts with ABC/ESPN had limited college football exposure for years, but with CBS now a player, the opportunity was ripe for conferences to get increased dollars and exposure for their football programs. CBS had been out of the business of broadcasting college football since 1990, but with the loss of their NFL contract to the upstart Fox network, CBS was looking for new sports properties to sign up. College football looked like a prime candidate.
What did that have to do with Big East expansion? Simple, or maybe not so simple: CBS was negotiating with the conference for a combination football/basketball TV contract, but only for the eight schools that played football.
You read that right. CBS was ready to sign a contract with the Big East’s eight football-playing schools not just for football, but for basketball. Ponder that a minute. On the football side it was a clean proposal, but on the basketball side, it was a mess. If the football schools signed a contract with CBS for basketball, it would give CBS rights to broadcast the hoops games of four schools that weren’t even in the Big East for basketball — schools such as Tech and Temple — but it wouldn’t give CBS the rights to broadcast games for the Big East basketball-only schools — schools such as St. John’s and Georgetown.
For the Big East, there were two solutions: (1) have the eight football schools break away into a new all-sports conference, making the TV contracts clean and simple; or (2) absorb the four football-only schools, which legally would make the new CBS basketball contract the property of all 14 schools, not just the eight football schools.
Heading into 1994, that was the situation, and you can see that either outcome was good for the Hokies. They would either be in an expanded Big East or in a new eight-team all-sports conference. Hokie fans were giddy with anticipation, and the issue was expected to be resolved in January or February of 1994.
In February, with Big East expansion still unresolved, CBS forced the issue by signing the eight BE football schools to a five-year, $72 million contract, $55 million of which was for football, and $17 million of which was for basketball. (As an aside, CBS also signed the SEC up to a five-year, $85 million deal for both football and basketball).
Within a week, ABC/ESPN followed suit, signing a five-year, $22 million contract with the eight football schools, bringing the total to $94 million over five years, or nearly $19 million a year. This really applied the pressure to the Big East football schools to expand the league or break away.
A breakaway looked like the most likely outcome, because 7 of 10 votes were needed for expansion, and at least four of the six basketball-only schools were staunchly opposed to expansion. A breakaway was such a near-certainty that in mid-February, athletic directors of the football schools met and drew up operating procedures for the anticipated new league. The four-team “Syracuse group” of Syracuse, BC, Pitt, and Miami, led by Syracuse AD Jake Crouthamel, pledged a breakaway if the league presidents didn’t vote for a four-team expansion.
On Wednesday, March 9, 1994, Big East presidents voted on expansion. But instead of membership in a 14-team league or an eight-team breakaway league, Virginia Tech got a knife in the back.
The news came back from the meeting: the league had voted for a two-team expansion of WVU and Rutgers, and Tech and Temple were left out in the cold.
When push came to shove, the Syracuse group didn’t have the guts to break away from the league that Crouthamel had helped found. In addition to the loyalty issue, which Crouthamel felt especially strong about, it would have cost the Syracuse group millions of dollars by requiring them to each pay $1-$2 million in exit fees, plus give up the NCAA basketball tournament revenue-sharing units the league had built up, worth about $400,000 a year.
So they protected their flanks by pulling in expansion properties Rutgers and WVU, while leaving out Virginia Tech and Temple, whom no one else wanted.
The shocked Hokies rightfully felt betrayed, but as often happens in expansion, what the athletic directors wanted and what the school presidents agreed to turned out to be two different things. The question remains, who came up with the idea of the two-team expansion? In a retrospective written in 2000 and posted on the Syracuse web site, Crouthamel wrote:
After meeting with CBS the directors of B.C., Pitt, Miami and I met. I suggested that the only shot we had at keeping everything together and at the same time benefiting from the CBS largesse was to get a majority vote by “packing the court.” To do that we needed to get two football schools accepted [emphasis added] as new members of The BIG EAST Conference.
In so saying, Crouthamel takes credit for the idea, singling himself out as the backstabber. But in a March 30, 1994 article in
Husky Blue and White, then-UConn president Harry Hartley took credit for the compromise idea.
The decision stung, but there was little the Hokies could do about it, other than fume. The Big East poured salt on the wound by declaring a five-year moratorium on expansion … then within a year, inviting Notre Dame in for all sports but football, making the league an unwieldy 13-team conglomeration.
The Hokies had been put in their place. They were not wanted.
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