It is not about basketball if it was then the dominant basketball only schools should form a Bball only conference a la NBA type of way east teams and west teams etc...Football is still considered big for UConn and has to be to get into B1G or any better conference soon!!
Thank you Ozzie !
I'll steal some print from Jacobs article because I don't want to do this again ( why not, he steals stuff from these boards)... ....
would the BE like to add Uconn ?... yes....their TV contract has been a ratings disaster for Fox so the Uconn brand could help, because the NBE is not the old BE... no one cares about a bunch of mid-western schools and the left overs minus Nova and G-Town. All of these TV deals were about over paying some schools to get control of the sum. A good % of the schools who benefited from the money in conference re-alignment have turned out not to be worth the paper the contracts were drawn on......and they know it.
.......
Does Uconn talk to the BE periodically?... yes, they have to, they still are BE members in a few women's sports.
Did Uconn talk to the BE in the last few years about parking some sports there ? Yes..... if the Big 12 did happen they would've needed a place for Men's and Women's soccer, etc, etc...... but then as Jacobs put it: " I don't pine for
Seton Hall or
St. John's. I'm not living in 1985. I do pine for
Pittsburgh and
Syracuse and
Louisville. So maybe I'm living in 2011. Those three, and
West Virginia and
Notre Dame, also aren't walking through that Big East door today, folks."
Now regarding Benedict:
"I have had no conversations with anyone at the Big East regarding us joining their league," Benedict said at Rentschler Field. "Period."
Off the record? "Off the record, on the record," Benedict interjected. "I have had no conversations with anyone at the Big East regarding us joining their league."
In case any intrepid sleuth wants to differentiate between Benedict himself and representatives of the school, consult his official statement. He said UConn.
"Look at what we've been doing and [a Big East move right now] would be counterproductive," Benedict said.
"We are trying to build our football program to get extremely competitive. Right now, the AAC is our best opportunity to grow all our sports. "No one knows what the future holds. Whether it's the last 10 years or the last 100 years, there is consistent change in college athletics. I wish there was someone who could predict the future, but there isn't. Right now, we are 100 percent committed to our football program and men's and women's basketball, as well as all our sports. Right now, the AAC is our best opportunity to grow all our sports."
And from Jacobs in his very long article:
The Big East, whose spokesman, John Paquette also denied there had been conversations with UConn, does not have a football league.
"That's the only thing that's standing in the way of a marriage," a source told Rothstein. " And the fact that I'm 61 years old and not cool is the only thing standing in the way of Beyonce leaving Jay Z to chase me.
"
"If you remember no other sentence in this piece, remember this one: Right now, the UConn hierarchy does not want to weaken football to the point where, if the Power Five (or whatever form the monopoly has) comes looking in future years, the program would be so irrelevant that the conferences would say forget UConn."
"Rejoining the Big East certainly is not a new argument...... Yet Wednesday, after the Big East denied discussions and Benedict so adamantly denied them, I have to believe there's nothing to it right now."......." Or maybe the Group of Five schools with the biggest budgets, which includes UConn, challenge the Power Five legally for inclusion before they tap themselves out.....Any of that kind of stuff could happen. Or none of it could happen......Nothing changed this week except that the debate surely will grow louder. "
full read: Courant / Jacobs: UConn-Big East Talk