😮💨This argument has been had thousands of times over. The Big East was great growing up for BBall, and it was fairly solid in football until all the defections occurred. I hated seeing the Big East being referred to as the Big Least. But it's not the 90's or 00's anymore. I am grateful that the Big East threw us a lifeline when we left the AAC. At that time Villanova was effectively carrying the conference. We join, a few years later Hurley wins back-to-back titles and we're the one carrying the conference. Geographically it's a no brainer, but we are the outlier in the conference. I say as someone who is Catholic that being the only public university in what is effectively a Catholic conference doesn't mesh with the identity of the school. The Big East is our purgatory. I think Family Guy captured it best:
I consider it a stop gap, something to allow us to triage our conference realignment wounds and see what else is out there. Well, we obviously know the answer, the problem is that the most obvious panacea (ACC) won't invite us while the one that more recently toyed with us (Big 12) won't bring us in as we do not really align with their southwest identity. We have no where to go but the Big East, and as has been said countless times, that will not sustain us. We've seen the Big East NCAA tournament bids become reduced, and our financial windfall from TV contracts isn't optimized to help us grow our athletic department. That's the reality of being in the Big East. It will not sustain our aspirations of being with the other major state universities. So where to go? Well, unfortunately like Richard Gere said in
An Officer and a Gentleman, we've "got nowhere else to go!", and that's the most frustrating thing of all. The American, we tried, and our men's BBall and football sucked...Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF thrived where we failed due to not taking football seriously enough. That said, going back to the American won't work. Sure Army, Temple, and Navy are near neighbors, but we aspire to be with "better" schools. Whether that comes across as arrogant or not, I don't care. We know who we want to date, and she's not returning our phone calls.