The Impending Doom of the New Big East

You have to wonder what Georgetown is thinking.

A year ago, its Big East schedule featured games against Notre Dame, Syracuse and Pittsburgh.

This year, a potential American Athletic Conference schedule would have featured high-profile games against Top 20 teams in Louisville, UConn and Memphis.

Instead, Georgetown will have one conference opponent that is ranked in the preseason Top 25 – Marquette.

Why are they doing this again?

The new Big East is set to launch this week and it has received a wave of positive media coverage from the moment Fox Sports made a “blood money” to the Catholic 7. It seemed to appeal to a multitude of factions. The college basketball media has not been able to help itself, heaping praise on a traditional basketball conference that will play a “true” round robin. The ESPN-haters are thrilled to see the competition from Fox Sports 1 taken to another level. And general college basketball fans are excited because there is even more college basketball games on television, as if that was even possible.

The absurdity reached a new level when a writer I thoroughly respect already started outlining the cases for possible expansion candidates. Expansion? The New Big East may want to survive a year or two first.

The league is about to be a failure of epic proportions. No amount of “Onions!” is going to save it. It has maybe a two-year shelf life.

Two things will conspire to eventually destroy it, but I don’t know which will happen first.

The ACC will eventually give up its fairytale of Notre Dame joining for all-sports – you know, football – and give in to its need for an even number of teams by inviting Georgetown. Fox Sports 1 is about to unload a literal mountain of money on Jim Delany’s front doorstep to get the Big Ten TV package. What do you think is more valuable to Fox Sports 1 on a Tuesday night in January – Indiana vs. Michigan or Villanova vs. Creighton?

Much like my piece about Boise State staying with Mountain West Conference, the moral of the new Big East story will be the fallacy of chasing the here and now instead of thinking about the future.

Let’s start with its creation – no one was clamoring for the new Big East. Fans didn’t want it. Players didn’t want it. Administrators didn’t want it. The only group that wanted it was the executives at Fox Sports 1 who faced the daunting task of launching an ESPN competitor without any live sports coverage during the winter.

The only conference up for bid was the old Big East conference – but Fox Sports didn’t need the football side thanks to deals with the Big 12 and the Pac-12. They just needed the basketball. They bought the basketball. In an act of desperation, Fox created a new basketball conference.

So remember that the next time you read a college basketball writer waxing poetically about the tradition of the new Big East – it was created by a television network.

There is also the not so insignificant matter that, historically, the teams involved in the new Big East are painfully mediocre. The much-discussed and much-ballyhooed Catholic 7 have combined for 3 Final Four appearances since 1999 – one less than UConn. The now-adored new Big East teams have combined 2 Championship Game appearances since 1999 – both by Butler, and one less than UConn national titles.

When is the last time St. John’s, Providence, Seton Hall or DePaul mattered? If you can answer that question, you’re probably pretty old. It’s been about 15 years.

The teams that the new Big East added? I mean, where to start? Do we even want to discuss the fate of Butler without Brad Stevens? Xavier hasn’t won an Atlantic-10 tournament title since 2006 while Temple – of the aforementioned American Athletic Conference – has three. Creighton is…well, who cares about Creighton? Doug McDermott is a good story for 2013-14 but you’re looking at a program whose ceiling is a 6 seed.

Yikes.

While Fox Sports is going all out to promote the new Big East, the fact remains that Fox Sports 1 has been its own failure through 2 months. Look at this chart of TV ratings for college football in 2013 and look at the pathetic numbers that the new network has been delivering. And that’s for football! Imagine the test pattern ratings the new Big East will get.

For Fox Sports 1, its most watched game came on October 12 when the power of ESPN Gameday and the undefeated, #2 Oregon Ducks led to an audience of 1.77 million. That was a million less than Alabama’s 48-7 shellacking of overmatched Kentucky on ESPN2 and less than half of the Michigan/Penn State audience at the same time.

The new Big East is about to play their games in a vacuum because no one is going to be paying attention.

Alas, all that Fox has created is a glorified mid-major conference. The ACC, Pac-12, Big 12 and Big 10 are clearly better. The American, especially this year, is miles better – if Memphis & UConn remain annual powers, this won’t change. The SEC is as well, if only due to Kentucky. That’s 6 better than the new Big East. Depending on how the Atlantic-10, Mountain West and West Coast Conference seasons play out, the new Big East could conceivably be the tenth-best conference this year.

Georgetown. Name-brand Georgetown. The school of Iverson, Ewing and Hoya Paranoia will be a mid-major team with TV audiences that could be measured in five-digits.

For years, the basketball schools of the Big East complained – sometimes loudly, sometimes behind closed doors – that the conference was skewed to the football-playing schools. When they finally broke away, it was treated as a liberating movement for all of college basketball.

Here’s a not-so-spoiler alert: The Catholic 7 should have kept their mouths shut and stayed with the American Athletic Conference. A conference with UConn, Memphis and Temple as well as Georgetown, Villanova and Marquette would have remained a legit power capable of grabbing 8 bids in a given year.

Instead, both conferences have been gutted and reduced in stature. The new Big East schools and its fans remain firmly lodged in the honeymoon phase, dreaming of Gus Johnson, kisses off the glass and a network devoted solely to them.

By January, the fallacy of this will become painfully evident. The conference will learn the hard way that Providence/Xavier games are barely good enough for ESPNU, that Butler vs. St. John’s won’t move the needle and their fade into irrelevance will be complete.

When Creighton shows up at the Verizon Center on March 4, the sight of 10,000 empty seats will elicit only one thought:

You have to wonder what Georgetown is thinking.

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