Yeah, no worries. I enjoy talking with you on the boards.
Defining, a rivalry is kind of tough. It reminds me of the supreme court justice, who said that he didn’t have a definition for what constituted “pornography”, but he knew it when he saw it.
So, first and foremost, the game has to matter to both sides. We have 50% of that for UConn PC games. It’s their biggest game of the year. I could see why it matters to them. We are the big dog in New England, a national program with multiple national championships, and they are a small college located in a state adjacent to us. Proximity to us is really their only claim to fame in the modern era. I smiled when a poster above said that PC isn’t even a little brother, they are like a little cousin, and one that you don’t really see all that often. There’s a relationship of a sort, but it is in a particularly meaning for one.
That leads us to the second criteria that comes to mind, that you need to have had meaningful games with the opponent to create a rivalry. When did Connecticut and Providence ever play each other in a game that was really meaningful? Certainly not on a national level and I don’t recall ever playing them to win one of our, what is it seven conference championships. Rivalries evolve naturally when opponents take something meaningful from you and the loss stings. Can you come up with anything for PC? Me either. Now some might say, well, I hate losing to them, but I would ask do you really hate losing to them more than you would hate losing to say, Fairfield or Yale? Losing to a traditionally inferior local opponent is annoying, but it’s not a rivalry.
Finally, the two programs need to be of equal stature and capability, so that the outcomes of the games are in doubt. That results in every game, being a battle, and close contested games help fuel the fire of a rivalry.
So, who are rivals now? I’m not sure that we have any. Certainly, there’s mutual dislike between the fan bases of Syracuse and Connecticut, but we don’t play them often enough for those games to be meaningful. Likewise, we despise BC fans, mostly because their school blackballed us from joining the ACC decades ago. But even when they played us with frequency, they weren’t much of a rival because the games weren’t competitive. Connecticut had like what, 20 something odd game winning streak versus Boston College. So, who’s left, Nova because they kept our seat warm as top dogs in the Big East when we were gone? Seton Hall because we often go after the same kids and they seem to have an ability to win games against us? I don’t think so. No one really leaps off the page. One can argue that we had a sort of rivalry with Duke back in the day when we were playing each other for meaningful games. We probably did, but their main rival is, of course, UNC with whom they have physical proximity and a long history of meaningful games.
So, rivalries aren’t mandated. They need to develop naturally over time. The question “so who is our rival” implies that you must have one. I don’t think that’s the case, and as we saw from the Diaco/UCF Conflict debacle, trying to force it ends up being a bad look.
, but I respect his commitment.
