San Diego State decides not to join the Big East conference. This is not surprising, on any level.
Somewhere along here in this discussion, was a statement to say that the Big East television rights contract deal is turning out poorly. I'd love to see somebody produce numbers to back it up, because there are none......yet. Jim Delany saw to that stopping in November before the numbers started coming.
What has happened in the meantime, is that schools like Boise, and like the basketball catholics, who essentially all have only one product to sell on the market, rather than a multifaceted athletic product........realized the value of their own product, and decided that they would rather keep the profits to themselves, than be part of something larger.
Boise squeezed a deal out of the MWC, that is going to come back and haunt that conference, but true to the environment and landscape, where the only purpose, to anything, is for an individual university leadership to make sure they have secured the best media rights deal that they can get for their own product.....Boise accomplished their task.
The basketball catholics? Falling right in line. They realized that they can make some nice coin on their own, with only men's basketball, and simply cut loose the football world - which they never really wanted anyway. The market made it possible for them to do that.
The conference I'd like to be affiliated with is the Big10, not the ACC. Never been the ACC - for me personally. But unless we get the invitiation to the prom, we're not going.
The good news for UConn, is that we are free agents, with the rag tag group of the Big East we have left. We sit in the middle of a battleground of huge corporate entities in the landscape. Comcast/NBC and ESPN/Disney - both co-owners of SNY. AT&T, Verizon........battling for network supremacy in the northeast corridor......
Our media rights - UConn - are indeed very valueable, and we are free agents, and we have plenty of immediate content to put on the air. It's sure going to get interesting soon. The lineup that the Big East is going to go to the tables with is settling down again.
All that remains to be seen is if we actually make it to the tables this time, or if another torpedo hits the conference broadside before a contract is set.
