No, Big East Football, and it was a legally separate entity when it was formed, was sort of reactionary to everything else going on. FSU decided on the ACC over the SEC. It had a choice. Bowden took the ACC.
Which immediately legitimized the Big East football conference.
Absolutely. They were the immediate anchor because Pitt was sliding off a cliff. Big East Football wouldn't have happened without them.
People knew it was coming to Miami well before because they knew what was going on there. Overt paying of players and worse had been going on since at least the mid 80s. ACC and SEC didn't want to touch them, and Miami was actively trying to get in the ACC. Remember, SMU was still fresh in everyone's mind.
Again, that's not really true. In 94, yes there were some stories coming out, and it got Dennis Erickson fired. However, Miami had already joined the Big East in 91 (the discussions having taken place at least a year prior). This idea that the ACC/SEC didn't want Miami doesn't hold water.
You think people in college football weren't aware of the goings on at Miami before they were in the press? From people that should know a bit about it, the other conferences didn't want them.
In a way, it’s fitting they ended up in the Big East initially because they actually had several long-standing series with some of the old eastern independents, much longer than Florida State. For context, five of their top ten most played opponents were from the old Big East (Pitt, Virginia Tech, Boston College, Syracuse, WVU). There wasn’t the same connection there for FSU even before each joined separate conferences.
Miami is way more like a northeastern private school than a southern school. They don't fit the southern culture at all. They draw a lot of students from the northeast. I like to say its where the northern most point of Havana and the southern most point of New Jersey meet.
Interesting. I knew about our series history with the them but didn’t know about their origin ties to Pitt… thanks for sharing. It makes sense why they don’t fit in “culturally” with the SEC, besides the fact that they’re a (relatively) small private school. They probably loved being in a northeast-centric conference for recruitment purposes.
It's why they wanted to take BC and Syracuse with them to the ACC.
Again, after now being in the ACC for 10 years, it is amazing how they pulled off that raid. Because now behind the curtains reminds me of when the Soviet Union collapsed and our military got to see their infrastructure and it was like "wait, we were afraid of this"? How the ACC beat the Big East to the punch is a great example of the malfeasance under Mike Tranghese.
Unlike FSU that is being outright public about wanting to leave, Miami and BC were not only publicly quiet, but operating behind everyone's back in dealing with the ACC. Not just plotting to leave with the ACC, but also doing so in a way that would inflict as much damage as possible on the way out because the goal was dissolution of the Big East with its BCS autobid defacto going to the ACC. Miami was flat out lying to other members when asked about their intent while they were obtaining and sitting in leadership positions in the conference. No one would have known a thing until they day of departure, at the very final moment possible to do so, if it hadn't leaked to Pitt's leadership as the reason Skip Prosser reneged on taking the Pitt job after Howland left.
Yup. It was the first iteration of a media company (Raycom) directly making decisions in conference realignment. It would’ve looked like this:
