The Big East is dead. Thank God or more precisely, thank the basketball schools. This league was founded as a basketball league but slowly morphed into a hybrid of basketball only and BCS schools. The basketball schools pulled out leaving behind a weird mix of schools that all joined in hopes of getting BCS money.
The league died as a real football conference 10 years ago when Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech decided to leave for the ACC and you could make an argument that this was inevitable ever since the basketball schools voted against Penn State’s entry in 1987. The only reason the league kept their BCS status was politics allowed it. This caused more schools to ask for a greater share of the pie and the ultimate result is the bowl system that shuts the door in 2014.
The Big East caused more damage to college sports than the SEC or the B1G combined. I’m sure apologists would disagree but the basketball-only schools were tired of the revolving door as the basketball product was becoming a joke. Replacing Syracuse, Pitt, and West Virginia with South Florida, Tulane and East Carolina was going to reduce revenues for them. While the football schools held the league hostage to BCS money, it is ironic that the final straw that killed the league was the threat to basketball revenue. Things had come full circle.
The Big East was the inspiration for the Boise State’s, Cincinnati, and Temple’s of the world that they could make the move from non-BCS status of $100,000 a year and start getting BCS money which is close to $2,000,000 (for an 8 team Big East). With that came the hope of television revenue even if they had to play most of their games on Monday - Friday.
Football money is fools gold for most athletic departments. Only 6 of the 65 schools in the BCS make money from college sports. Revenues at these schools are dependent on 3 things, ticket sales, tv revenue, and bowl money. The B1G gives it's members about $30-$40 million per year. In comparison the number is between $1-2 million for schools outside of the BCS. With that level of revenue, schools depend on donations, student fees, and general fund allocations (ie – state money that comes from taxes) to make up the difference. As schools ‘invested’ to get to BCS status, costs escalated. The USA Today has an annual database of information that shows just how bad this has gotten in recent years. This is just a sample:
As you can see, the expenses of the average school in the sample rose by $13 million in the last 5 years. Taxes and student fees rose by $5 million to help offset it as ticket sales, donations and TV revenue only rose by $8 million. Most of the increase came from the increase in coaches salaries and buildings (almost $10 million combined). Compare the numbers to Ohio State and you can see these schools aren’t even in the same ballpark and never will be.
Rutger’s gamble paid off as they will soon be getting an extra $30 million in the B1G (paid for by their cable subscribers). East Carolina, Boise State, and Cincinnati are left scrambling for a league and will most likely end up where they started.
Maybe now that this has happened, sanity will return to college athletics and all schools will start to face their real issues.
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