" I don't think the Big East hid it. I think the Big East caused it...the Big East and, to a lesser extent, Penn State.

The Big East made two terrible long term decisions: it focused on basketball first, and it didn't include PSU as a football member. If all the northeast football schools had been a member of the same conference it would have helped that conference build a football brand. While the Big East leadership was worried about whether Providence and St Johns would get a tourney invite, the rest of the football conferences were building a cohesive brand around their football that was based in large part on geography.

PSU joined the B1G, associated themselves with the midwestern schools, and quit playing their former eastern rivals in Pitt/SU. It was a good strategic move on their part to diminish other NE schools that now weren't in their conference and improved their own recruiting. The Big East responded by adding Miami and VaTech (as an associate member). So the NE teams were fragmented, playing in different conferences. There were no real NE rivalries because nobody played PSU anymore, and SU and Pitt were never good at the same time. There was no cohesive Big East football brand, there was no cohesive Big East football geography, and the one school that could have anchored that for the Big East was playing in the B1G, bringing OSU and Michigan into PA (one of only two really fertile NE recruiting grounds). Meanwhile, SU, Pitt, and BC were traveling to Miami and Blacksburg.

Having lived in MD, NC, and Ohio after graduating SU, I can see how very different conference affiliation is when your conference rivals are local. I felt like VT and Miami were sort of rivals when I was in college, but they were so damn far away. I didn't know any VT fans, or Miami fans. Contrast that with Carolina-NC State, OSU-Michigan, Oklahoma-Texas, Alabama-Auburn, etc. Kids in other places grew up being force-fed conference games with local rivals and local fanbases, and wanted to be a part of that. Kids in the NE didn't. Again, I think that would have been different if PSU had been in the Big East.

The decline of NE football often gets blamed on lack of talent being spread among too many mediocre teams. Demographic shifts with people moving south. Year round football in the southern states. Maybe that's true to an extent. It doesn't seem to hurt OSU or Michigan. There's a lot of talent in PA and NJ. If there had been any kind of vision on the part of the Big East with regard to football, I think we would be reaping the rewards today. Instead, a lot of those kids are playing in the B1G."


syracuse95, Oct 9, 2016