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Message: [QUOTE="Plebe, post: 3190941, member: 6927"] Dana O'Neil, formerly of ESPN and now with The Athletic, has a positive take (written from the perspective of men's basketball): [URL unfurl="true"]https://theathletic.com/1042047/2019/06/22/oneil-uconn-is-going-home-and-the-big-east-will-be-better-for-it/[/URL] [INDENT]For UConn, this is the ultimate rescue operation, the offer saving the university from itself. Snookered by the lure of a Fiesta Bowl bid in 2011, the basketball-proud institution decided to become a football school — except not a very good one — and found itself standing on the fault line of the conference realignment tectonic plate. The highs of that bowl-bid season have slowly eroded into one low followed by another, the school tethered to a stadium that sits 25 miles from campus and nearly empty on most fall Saturdays. In the meantime, the basketball program, built on storied rivalries with Georgetown and Villanova, was pushed out of its natural fit and into forced marriages with the likes of Tulsa, Houston and Tulane. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t gone well.[/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [/QUOTE]