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Message: [QUOTE="jostar1, post: 5037325, member: 1737"] Well, BC did block us in 2011. And this story also confirms ESPN's role, as CL82 said. [B]An article in The Boston Globe on Sunday became the talk of college athletics, as it reported just how brazen and blatant Boston College’s blocking of Connecticut’s move to the Atlantic Coast Conference was.[/B] “We didn’t want them in,” Boston College’s athletic director, Gene DeFilippo, told The Globe. “It was a matter of turf. We wanted to be the New England team.” The most stunning comment in the article was DeFilippo’s public admission that ESPN guided the A.C.C.’s decision to add Syracuse and Pittsburgh last month. “We always keep our television partners close to us,” DeFilippo told The Globe. “You don’t get extra money for basketball. It’s 85 percent football money. TV — ESPN — is the one who told us what to do. This was football; it had nothing to do with basketball.” DeFilippo’s comments give credence to the popular theory that ESPN encouraged Pittsburgh and Syracuse’s exit from the Big East in the wake of the Big East’s turning down ESPN’s billion dollar television deal in May during an exclusive negotiating window. ESPN has a billion dollar deal with the A.C.C., making that move either savvy business or collusion, depending on one’s perspective. [/QUOTE]