What Happens Next?

By John Antonik for MSNsportNET.com
May 29, 2003

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Well respected sports writer Mickey Furfari was having a friendly conversation with Penn State athletic director Jim Tarman after a West Virginia basketball game in State College, Pa., in 1989 when Tarman casually mentioned something that caught Furfari’s attention.

“This time next year we may be in the Big Ten,” Tarman whispered.

“Do you really think so?” answered Furfari.

“Maybe.”

Somewhat taken aback, Mickey decided to sit on Tarman’s bombshell and wait to see how things played out. “I missed the scoop of my life,” Furfari moaned. “Less than a year later Penn State announced it was joining the Big Ten Conference.”

Penn State had had enough of Eastern football.

Penn State fails to form an Eastern all-sports conference


	Penn State coach Joe Paterno tried for years to organize an Eastern all-sports conference (AP photo).

For more than a decade, Penn State tried to convince its Eastern partners that an all-sports alignment was in their best interests. The movement reached its peak in 1982 after the Nittany Lions’ first national football championship. Coach Joe Paterno, at the time also doubling as the school’s athletic director, was the leading advocate for establishing an Eastern all-sports league and he organized a meeting with football independent schools near Philadelphia.

According to Penn State athletic official Frank Giardina in a recent written account for the Charleston Daily Mail, the composition of the all-sports league was to be made up of Penn State, Boston College, Pitt, Rutgers, Syracuse, Temple, West Virginia and possibly the two service academies, Army and Navy. At the time there was also some feeling that this conglomeration might have been able to convince Maryland to jump from the ACC to the potential new league.

Many involved in the negotiations thought the league was going to become a reality, but a decisive stumbling block proved to be the percentage of revenue sharing. The formula was said to be in the 16- to 17-percent range for bowl proceeds, but Pitt, at the time a football power and regularly going to good bowl games, balked at the revenue sharing plan and instead decided to join Syracuse and Boston College in the Big East Conference and remain as a football independent.

An amusing story making the rounds afterward in Pittsburgh was that late Panther basketball coach Roy Chipman was not in favor of joining the all-sports league because he saw membership in the Big East as a way to stick it to West Virginia, Duquesne and Penn State.

Whether or not that story was true, there was a certain level of mistrust, jealousy and lack of vision by some Eastern schools that led to the demise of Paterno’s all-sports league concept. Sadly, that mistrust prevails today.

Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel, in a written account published on Syracuse’s official athletic web site, said Penn State initially asked to be admitted into the eight-team Big East Conference but was turned down by a vote of 5-3. Instead, the Big East schools decided to add Pitt as its ninth member. In Crouthamel’s words, Pitt’s membership in the Big East combined with Syracuse and Boston College “checkmated” Penn State’s Eastern sports conference, and the all-conference movement was dead.

Four years prior to Paterno’s push for an all-sports league, the Big East Conference came about because of newly imposed NCAA men’s basketball in-season scheduling requirements. According to Crouthamel, athletic directors from Providence, St. John’s, Georgetown and Syracuse got together to forge an alliance for men’s basketball. The group, spearheaded by Providence athletic director Dave Gavitt, then chose Boston College over Holy Cross, UMass and Boston University for its fifth school.

An invitation was extended to Connecticut to make the league six teams. Rutgers was asked to join but refused, instead deciding to stay in the Eastern 8 where it wished to remain aligned with Penn State. That opened the way for Seton Hall to join the Big East and become the seventh charter member.

A year later in 1980, Villanova left the Eastern 8 to join the Big East over Temple and St. Joseph’s and Pitt was added to the mix for 1982-83 season.

This alliance proved particularly fruitful in men’s basketball with Georgetown, Syracuse and St. John’s helping the Big East rise to national prominence. But the Big East’s failure to adequately deal with the football issue proved to be a haunting consequence that would have far-lasting implications for Eastern athletics. Football was the Big East’s glass onion, with its many unpleasant layers ready to be peeled off by its competitors.

Even a visionary like Dave Gavitt, who moved from Providence to become the league’s first commissioner, couldn’t fully comprehend the role college football would play in his intricately designed union of basketball schools.

Stuck in the middle

Although West Virginia was not an original member of the Big East basketball conference, decisions were being made by the league that directly impacted the school.

Soon after it was formed, the Big East snatched Eastern 8 member Villanova and then added Pitt two years later.

The Eastern 8 was an extension of the Eastern Collegiate Basketball League, formed in 1976 and included Duquesne, George Washington, Massachusetts, Penn State, Pitt, Rutgers, Villanova and West Virginia.

Revolving membership was a primary characteristic of the league, which changed its name to the Eastern 8 in 1978. St. Bonaventure replaced Penn State in 1978 and in 1981 Rhode Island took the place of Villanova. Finally in 1983 the Eastern 8 became known as the Atlantic 10 when it added Temple, St. Joseph’s and once again Penn State.

The grouping wasn’t ideal for West Virginia, by then a moderately sized public university aligned with smaller private schools possessing limited athletic budgets. But then again, any conference affiliation was better than nothing for the geographically challenged Mountaineers.

WVU’s first major conference affiliation came in the late 1930s when it participated in the Eastern Boxing League. West Virginia also played in a small form of an Eastern Basketball League comprised of schools like Pitt, Fordham, Penn State and Temple.

That soon gave way to independence.

In the late 1940s, West Virginia athletic director Roy “Legs” Hawley was finding it increasingly difficult to schedule football and basketball games. His solution to the problem in 1950 was to enter the Southern Conference, a 17-team monstrosity that boasted a formidable lineup of schools that included Clemson, Duke, Maryland, North Carolina, North Carolina State, South Carolina, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest.

No sooner did West Virginia get settled into the Southern Conference when the North Carolina schools broke off to form the Atlantic Coast Conference on May 8, 1953, at the Sedgefield Inn near Greensboro, N.C.

Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State and Wake Forest joined forces with Clemson, Maryland and South Carolina to establish a seven-team conference. Six months later in December, 1953, Virginia became the ACC’s eighth school.

According to Mickey Furfari, West Virginia had its sights set on being that eighth school.

“West Virginia was hoping Maryland would sponsor them for ACC membership but they didn’t,” Furfari recalled. “The motion came up quickly and South Carolina voted in favor but the North Carolina schools didn’t vote for West Virginia.”

Their primary reason was West Virginia’s inaccessibility. There were no major interstate highways leading into Morgantown, W.Va., and the city’s small airport couldn’t handle large aircraft.


	Football coach Jim Carlen convinced West Virginia to leave the Southern Conference in 1968 (WVU Sports Communications).

“Driving to Richmond back then took an entire day,” Furfari said.

Any hopes West Virginia had of escaping a watered-down Southern Conference were dashed when Duke visited Morgantown for the school’s holiday basketball classic in 1963. The team endured a difficult charter flight to Morgantown on an old DC-10 that left all of them sick.

Smith Barrier, a nationally known sports writer and a close friend of West Virginia University athletic director Red Brown, later told Furfari that he overhead Duke coach Vic Bubas on the flight say he would never again come to Morgantown to play a basketball game.

West Virginia remained in the Southern Conference until the end of the 1968 season when football coach Jim Carlen convinced Brown to leave the league and become an independent in football.

“Carlen pulled West Virginia out of the Southern Conference and then a year later he left for Texas Tech,” said Furfari.

The decision to leave the Southern Conference helped remove the shackles from the football program but it put an extraordinary burden on West Virginia’s other sports. WVU’s first basketball season outside the Southern Conference saw the Mountaineers play games against UCLA, Santa Clara, Arizona, St. John’s, Maryland, Duke, Syracuse and Florida. Not surprisingly, West Virginia posted a losing 12-14 record.

By the mid 1970s it was apparent that West Virginia once again needed a conference affiliation for scheduling and joined the ECBL.

In the mid 1980s West Virginia was approached by the Metro Conference to join the league for basketball. Athletic director Fred Schaus resisted the temptation to move his team out of the Northeast.

“The media and a good number of West Virginia fans were for going,” Furfari said. “Metro Conference representatives even made a visit to the West Virginia University campus.”

Once again in 1990 West Virginia was courted by the Metro in a plan that included a 16-team super conference made up of existing Metro schools and Eastern independents. Raycom, Inc., under the direction of Metro commissioner Ralph McFillen, presented a plan that would join West Virginia, Pitt, Boston College, East Carolina, Syracuse with Cincinnati, Florida State, Louisville, Memphis, South Carolina, Southern Mississippi, Tulane and Virginia Tech.

Movement toward establishing an Eastern football conference was gaining momentum.

Big East Football Conference created

"Having a proactive agenda in a conference made up of dissimilar football and basketball schools is akin to former senator Alexander Wiley’s characterization of the U.S. Congress: someone gets up and says nothing, no one pays attention, and then everyone disagrees."

In 1990, the Big East Conference’s football problem fell directly into the lap of new Big East commissioner Michael Tranghese, who was on the job for a few weeks when Penn State made the announcement that it was joining the Big Ten.

In August, the SEC plucked Arkansas from the Southwest Conference and added South Carolina a month later to form a 12-team super conference.

Realizing the role football played in college athletics and understanding that Syracuse, Boston College and Pitt were dangerously exposed, Tranghese brokered a deal to take Miami off the market and added the Hurricanes as the Big East’s 10^th member in 1990.

This ultimately led to the Big East’s football-only federation that included West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Rutgers and Temple. It became known as the Big East Football Conference on Feb. 5, 1991.

Although the relationship was for football only, it was becoming apparent by the mid-1990s that this union wasn’t going to hold. In essence there were two separate leagues operating under the same roof: the Big East Football Conference and the Big East Conference.

Having a proactive agenda in a conference made up of dissimilar football and basketball schools is akin to former senator Alexander Wiley’s characterization of the U.S. Congress: someone gets up and says nothing, no one pays attention, and then everyone disagrees.

The football issue forced the Big East to reconsider the status of West Virginia and Rutgers and after considerable debate by the league’s basketball schools, both were added as full-fledged members. In addition, Notre Dame was also included for all sports except football for the start of the 1995-96 academic year.

Temple and Virginia Tech were left out in the cold.

This compromise kept things in check until 1999 when the status of Virginia Tech once again forced another deciding moment for the league. Reopening the same wounds, the 13 Big East schools wrestled with the notion of adding another team to its all-sports league to further complicate its basketball composition – particularly its postseason tournament setup at Madison Square Garden.

The ultimate solution was to admit Virginia Tech in all sports, facilitate Connecticut’s move from Division I-AA football to Division I status, and later exercise an attendance clause that would ultimately force Temple out of the league.

The beach ball was being pushed farther down into the water and the time was rapidly approaching when that ball was going to fly right back up into their faces.

Tech’s trepidation

Virginia Tech was happy to be joining the Big East conference, but the school delayed its entry into the league by two seasons until the 2001-02 academic year. The reason was simple: Virginia Tech athletic director Jim Weaver was worried that either the ACC or the SEC might present a compelling case to Miami and convince the Hurricanes to leave the Big East.

Although Miami was coming off an NCAA probation period that saw its record drop to 5-6 in 1997 and improve somewhat a year later in 1998, the Hurricanes were still a very appealing entity.

By contrast, Big East football in 1998 was not very appealing.

Syracuse captured the conference title with an 8-3 record and was beaten soundly by Florida in the Orange Bowl as part of the recently formed and controversial Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Worried about the prospects of a watered down television deal and the danger of losing its BCS status, Tranghese initiated a secret meeting with the Atlantic Coast Conference in an attempt to protect his league’s flank.

Some of the details of this meeting were revealed earlier this month by Citadel athletic director Les Robinson, who at the time was the athletic director at North Carolina State. Rehashed in the May 24 edition of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the apparent reason Tranghese set up the meeting at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport in 1998 was to gauge the ACC’s interest in a football-only merger. At the time, Tranghese was fearful of another attempt by the Big Ten to expand to 12 teams and take either Pitt, Rutgers or Notre Dame.

Those in the meeting included Robinson, Tranghese, Florida State athletic director Dave Hart, ACC commissioner John Swofford, Miami athletic director Paul Dee and Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel.

“Miami had some interest and Syracuse was listening intently,” Robinson was quoted in the Sun-Sentinel.

As it turned out, Jim Weaver had every reason to be concerned about the status of the Big East.

ACC’s courtship of Miami

Just how many presentations the Atlantic Coast Conference has made to Miami is unknown, but Michael Tranghese said at the Big East meetings in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., that there have been several.

In 1999 news began leaking out of the ACC football meetings that the conference was considering the issue of expansion. Only twice since 1953 has the league added teams. In 1979 Georgia Tech was added to the fold and in 1991 Florida State became the ACC’s ninth team.

“This conference has been and continues to be very deliberate in regard to the expansion issue,” said Swofford at the time. “There’s a process that is there. We have not reached a formal stage at this point, and I don’t know if we will.”

In simpler terms, Swofford didn’t have the necessary seven out of nine league votes for expansion. Reasons for concern about ACC expansion include losing complete home-and-home schedules for basketball, football teams not playing every other league member annually, dealing with decreased ticket allotments per school for the ACC men’s basketball tournament, and increased travel for non-revenue teams.

More importantly, Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski was publicly opposed to the ACC doing anything to disrupt its basketball league.

Schools in favor of expansion had its biggest stake in the football conference: Florida State, Georgia Tech and Clemson.

ACC basketball won out in 1999, but the football schools remained persistent. Additional financial studies were conducted.

Swofford said ominously in 1999: “What’s important from our standpoint is that we be proactive in our thinking,” he told the St. Petersburg Times. “What I mean by proactive is talking about our future and whether we’re better off at nine, or for the future, we’re better off with an additional team or more, as well as discussing what’s going on around us or what potentially may go on around us in other leagues.”

The ACC blueprint for future expansion was established.

Big East thrives


	Big East commissioner Michael Tranghese has presided over a football conference that has had either the nation's No. 1 or No. 2 ranked team in each of the last four years (Big East photo).

The Big East survived the ACC’s half-hearted attempt at a hostile takeover in 1999 and the conference once again thrived. Connecticut won the men’s basketball national championship and Connecticut women’s basketball replaced Tennessee as the sport’s marquee program. Notre Dame produced its first national title in women’s basketball in 2001 to compliment UConn’s four NCAA titles from 1995-2003. This spring, Syracuse captured its first-ever men's basketball championship.

Virginia Tech, behind the brilliant play of quarterback Michael Vick, was one quarter away from winning its first national championship in football in 1999.

Miami had restocked its roster after NCAA probation and reached No. 2 in the national polls in 2000, narrowly missing out on a spot in the national championship game against Big 12 winner Oklahoma.

A year later in 2001 Miami ran the table and won its second national championship as a representative of the Big East Conference. Last fall, an official’s call kept the Hurricanes from becoming college football’s first repeat champion since Nebraska did it in 1994-95.

For four straight years, the Big East Conference had either the nation’s No. 1 or No. 2-ranked football team. The last two seasons, half of its football members finished ranked in the Top 25. And while Miami has always been considered the crown jewel of the football conference, no Big East team has done more over the last 10 years than Virginia Tech.

Since 1993, the Hokies have finished ranked in the Top 25 nine times including Top 10 finishes in 1995, 1999 and 2000.

“We’ve been at this for 24 years and we’ve been at it in football for 13 years,” said Tranghese. “We think what we’ve done is a pretty impressive accomplishment. As always we think we’ve been prepared to stand up and compete with anybody.”

The same couldn’t be said for the Big East’s southern neighbors in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Since the ACC began discussing the addition of Miami in 1999, ACC football has fallen on hard times. The league’s cornerstone team, Florida State, slid to fifth in the national ratings in 2000 and all the way down to 15^th in 2001.

Hampered by several off-field incidents and disturbing accusations that former quarterback Adrian McPherson may have bet on football games, Florida State fell to 23^rd in the national rankings last season despite winning the ACC title and representing the conference in the Bowl Championship Series.

The wolves are beginning to circle around 73-year-old Seminole coach Bobby Bowden in Tallahassee. Problems are also brewing in Atlanta, where Georgia Tech this spring was forced to suspend 10 football players and a men’s tennis player for academic shortcomings just two years after Yellow Jackets football coach George O’Leary was caught lying on his resume.

The last time two ACC football teams finished ranked in the Top 10 was in 1998 when Florida State was third and Georgia Tech was ninth. Last year the ACC came dangerously close to having the embarrassing “Big East clause” enacted, meaning its conference champion almost wasn’t ranked high enough to qualify for a BCS game.

Swofford was ready to pull the master plan off the shelf.

Tranghese sounds off

The Big East went into crisis mode in mid-April when Commissioner Michael Tranghese told trusted friend Dick Weiss of the New York Daily News that the ACC was planning once again to try and lure Miami away from the Big East.

However this time, the ACC was prepared to include two other teams (Syracuse and Boston College) along with Miami to make a 12-team super conference on par with the SEC and Big 12.

“They’re trying to divide and conquer,” said Tranghese.

Several news stories followed as events began to pick up steam. Swofford wanted to stage his raid by stealth, ironing out all of the details with his member schools in private before officially inviting the three new members into the league.

But Tranghese turned on the light and brought the ACC’s plans out into the open.

“It’s unfortunate,” was Swofford’s reply to Tranghese’s outburst.

Operating under a rapidly closing window of opportunity, Swofford was able to put together a convincing presentation to conference athletic directors and head coaches. His plea was so persuasive that Mike Krzyzewski, once strongly opposed to expansion, stepped aside. The dominoes immediately began to fall.

The league got the necessary votes for expansion in a straw poll. The only hurdle left was whether or not to add Virginia Tech into the mix. Besides Virginia, which was receiving local political pressure to include Virginia Tech, there was little support from the rest of the ACC for the Hokies. The league picked Miami, Boston College and Syracuse as its three targets for expansion. The ACC believes that Syracuse will deliver the lucrative New York City television market and BC will cover the Boston market.

Former commissioner Roy Kramer, the architect of the Southeastern Conference’s successful 1990 acquisition of Arkansas and South Carolina, scratched his head when he was asked to explain the ACC’s attempt to gut the Big East.

“One of the things we looked at was homogenous institutions,” Kramer told ESPN.com’s Ivan Maisel. “We wanted schools with a strong fan base that traveled well. TV wasn’t a dominating factor. Our people were interested in fan base and a broad-based program. I don’t know what the ACC is looking for. I suspect that they are looking for TV markets and a football image.”

If expansion moves forward, the ACC will have a tough time cracking the Boston market. Once ACC expansion news made its way off the Internet chat boards into more solid mediums, the Boston Globe chose to run the story on the back pages of its sports section. Even now in its advanced stages, ACC expansion has yet to become a page one story in the Globe.

Syracuse may be located in New York, but gaining the valuable New York City market is an even bigger stretch. New York City is not a big college football town and the two biggest football attractions are Penn State and Notre Dame – not Syracuse.

As for ACC basketball in New York City, forget about it. “If you think people in New York City are going to come see Clemson play Boston College in Madison Square Garden you’re mistaken,” Tranghese said.


	Miami president Donna Shalala's decision will determine the future makeup of the Big East Conference (AP photo).

According to published reports, Miami’s interest in the ACC is primarily financial. The school admitted losing more than $1.4 million two years ago despite winning the national football championship. The Atlantic Coast Conference’s revenue sharing model netted member schools more than $9 million each last year.

One Big East athletic official compared the ACC’s revenue sharing plan to that of socialism, while the Big East is more like capitalism: win and you get more of the pie.

The ACC says a conference football championship game would give the league an additional $30 million, which would more than make up for the addition of three new teams. The Big East contends the ACC’s financial figures are cooked and the next television contract will be significantly less than what the ACC has promised Miami, Syracuse and BC.

Despite being two of the original seven Big East schools, Syracuse and Boston College are said to be interested in the move because in the words of Jake Crouthamel, a Big East football conference without Miami is not “viable.”

As strange as it sounds, Crouthamel says his school is prepared to travel long distances to play an all-sports ACC schedule just to stay aligned with Miami. Boston College says it is prepared to do the same.

If Miami, Boston College and Syracuse leave the Big East, the conference will have just Pitt, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Rutgers and Connecticut left as football playing schools. More teams would have to be added to keep the Big East in business.

Notre Dame has been quiet throughout the entire process and it's unclear what the school's intentions are. The Irish have experienced a resurgence in their Olympic sports and will try to protect them. However, it is unlikely Notre Dame will offer its football program to the Big East.

The fate of the Big East Conference as we know it now rests on the shoulders of Miami president Donna Shalala, once a member of the Bill Clinton administration. Recently Shalala made a pledge of allegiance to league presidents, saying she was perfectly content with her school’s affiliation with the Big East Conference.

Obviously something has changed since then.

Meanwhile, old Joe Paterno is sitting up in State College, Pa., glad his hands are clean of this mess.

John Antonik can be reached at John.Antonik@mail.wvu.edu

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