4 PM Headlines: Kentucky Wildcats PS All Americans, Football Wildcats, & Realignment Ad Naseum
By Wayne
Mar 3, 2012; Milwaukee, WI, USA; A Big East banner is displayed during the game between the Georgetown Hoyas and Marquette Golden Eagles at the Bradley Center. Marquette defeated Georgetown 83-69. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sport
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any weirder, the Big Least is making headlines again in this whole conference realignment/money whore movement…and it isn’t pretty. According to Gary Parrish, citing multiple sources and reports, the 7 non-FBS football members are splitting from their FBS football brethren.
Per Gary:
"The Big East’s seven non-FBS football-playing members have decided to separate from the league’s football-playing members and would like to announce the decision within a week barring an unexpected change of plans, multiple sources within the conference told CBSSports.com on Thursday…"
Make up?
"Whether a new league featuring DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova would be called the Big East or something else is, like almost everything else, unresolved. But a source told CBSSports.com that those seven schools would target at least three and perhaps five basketball programs to join them, and that Xavier, Dayton, St. Louis, Creighton and Butler would be among the targets…"
Why now?
"A source told CBSSports.com that the league’s nonfootball-playing members have simply determined that they’re going to have to move on someday and are finally ready “to just go ahead and do it.” That belief seems to trump the idea that the nonfootball-playing members might be leaving television revenue on the table by separating — although it should be noted that athletic directors at those schools aren’t sure they can’t get a comparable or even better TV contract with a strong basketball-only league."
The REAL winners in all this conference realignment mess are the multitude of Counsel involved who have to sort this out. Billable hours, baby. Billable. Hours. Essentially what you have are rich, greedy, power hungry figure heads deciding what they want then let others sort out the legality of such decisions. It doesn’t typically work like that in the real world, but in the world of big $$ TV, it apparently does there.
The REAL question is, “who cares?” No one really does. I mean come on, it’s the Big Least.