I started this thread on the basketball forum and would love your thoughts over here......
I have watched this 30 for 30 a bunch of times and the other day I was laying in bed and it was on again. And I watch it with a different filter now as the ACC is going through many of the same struggles now as the Big East did back then. Here are my thoughts and I would love yours....
1) There is a lot of revisionist history going on in that show. The conference blew up because the basketball schools never wanted to acquiesce much to the football schools and Mike Tranghese was a good commissioner but he was a basketball guy and wasn't strong enough to get the Georgetown's and Villanova's to see the future of college athletics. The model was never going to work and needed to change and I remember covering all of those years when teams started leaving. It wasn't "greed" as they said and it wasn't that football was trying to take over - it was and is very clear that football revenues drove the bus. And the Big East was the first of the conferences to create their own network (or at least produce their own games) and had they struck a deal that made sense for everyone they could have survived. But again, when Tranghese was trying to constantly appease the basketball schools it just wasn't going to work. They should have worked hard to create a 10-team football conference and an 8-team basketball conference to survive the changing landscape. They didn't want to and it all blew up.
2) The ACC is now doing a similar thing. The one thing they did better than the Big East was at least get something (five football games) out of Notre Dame. And now that Notre Dame signed a 12-year deal with Clemson, Notre Dame is trying to make it so all 12 games count towards their allotment of ACC games over the course of the agreement. That means there will only be four ACC games for Notre Dame (plus Clemson) every year and further cuts the pie in terms of how often teams get to play Notre Dame. It is not good. Pitt was probably being a good partner and didn't pursue its own deal with Notre Dame but as we have seen, Clemson does what it wants and the ACC is held hostage because they need Clemson and know it. If I was Allen Greene, I would still pursue some sort of separate deal with Notre Dame, especially since it looks like the USC game is falling apart. The ACC is at a critical point right now and the way they are going to divide revenues now (unequally) is a dangerous game to play.
3) I am not sure how you could watch that and not miss Big East basketball. My first year covering the ACC tournament in Greensboro - after years at the Garden with the Big East - my comments were "this feels like an NCAA regional, not a conference tournament." There just is no real atmosphere, it is stale and quite frankly a lot of the ACC games just feel stale. That's not to say Pitt isn't in the place it needs to be right now but man, those days in the Big East were the best of times, especially when Pitt was rolling. And those games in the 1980s were just basically wars. Almost all of my best and favorite memories of Pitt basketball came in the Big East.
4) The Big East teams are probably going to get the last laugh in basketball because all of their revenue sharing is going to go their basketball programs. That means they will have higher payrolls and probably be able to compete at a higher level than most of the ACC except the top blue blood type teams. The ACC has a problem in that it is trying to get into the big boys room in football and that has hurt its basketball conference. It really has. You can't spend all the money on football and then wonder why your basketball conference is falling behind. The Big Ten and SEC have a lot of resources and money and they have been able to spend to build both their football and basketball conferences. So far, looking at the commitment from the ACC schools, it seems like it has been an either/or proposition. It can't be, these schools need to figure out how to be viable in both sports. I am reading some horror stories about some schools in the ACC - Pitt might be one of them - looking to cut sports and do a number of things like that in order to survive. The Big East football conference could have been a thing but the people running the conference didn't understand that schools like Miami and Virginia Tech needed to be taken seriously in terms of what their priorities were.
5) One last thing, the Big East not inviting Penn State was a misstep but I firmly believe even if they had and Penn State joined the conference it would have been in the Big Ten by the end of the 1990s anyway. The powers that be at Penn State believed they fit best in the Big Ten, academically and athletically. So I think it is a stretch to say if Penn State had come, it would have changed everything because I think they would have come and gone and that might actually have moved the timeline up for the implosion of the conference.
I don't know what your thoughts are on this but would love to get them.
I have watched this 30 for 30 a bunch of times and the other day I was laying in bed and it was on again. And I watch it with a different filter now as the ACC is going through many of the same struggles now as the Big East did back then. Here are my thoughts and I would love yours....
1) There is a lot of revisionist history going on in that show. The conference blew up because the basketball schools never wanted to acquiesce much to the football schools and Mike Tranghese was a good commissioner but he was a basketball guy and wasn't strong enough to get the Georgetown's and Villanova's to see the future of college athletics. The model was never going to work and needed to change and I remember covering all of those years when teams started leaving. It wasn't "greed" as they said and it wasn't that football was trying to take over - it was and is very clear that football revenues drove the bus. And the Big East was the first of the conferences to create their own network (or at least produce their own games) and had they struck a deal that made sense for everyone they could have survived. But again, when Tranghese was trying to constantly appease the basketball schools it just wasn't going to work. They should have worked hard to create a 10-team football conference and an 8-team basketball conference to survive the changing landscape. They didn't want to and it all blew up.
2) The ACC is now doing a similar thing. The one thing they did better than the Big East was at least get something (five football games) out of Notre Dame. And now that Notre Dame signed a 12-year deal with Clemson, Notre Dame is trying to make it so all 12 games count towards their allotment of ACC games over the course of the agreement. That means there will only be four ACC games for Notre Dame (plus Clemson) every year and further cuts the pie in terms of how often teams get to play Notre Dame. It is not good. Pitt was probably being a good partner and didn't pursue its own deal with Notre Dame but as we have seen, Clemson does what it wants and the ACC is held hostage because they need Clemson and know it. If I was Allen Greene, I would still pursue some sort of separate deal with Notre Dame, especially since it looks like the USC game is falling apart. The ACC is at a critical point right now and the way they are going to divide revenues now (unequally) is a dangerous game to play.
3) I am not sure how you could watch that and not miss Big East basketball. My first year covering the ACC tournament in Greensboro - after years at the Garden with the Big East - my comments were "this feels like an NCAA regional, not a conference tournament." There just is no real atmosphere, it is stale and quite frankly a lot of the ACC games just feel stale. That's not to say Pitt isn't in the place it needs to be right now but man, those days in the Big East were the best of times, especially when Pitt was rolling. And those games in the 1980s were just basically wars. Almost all of my best and favorite memories of Pitt basketball came in the Big East.
4) The Big East teams are probably going to get the last laugh in basketball because all of their revenue sharing is going to go their basketball programs. That means they will have higher payrolls and probably be able to compete at a higher level than most of the ACC except the top blue blood type teams. The ACC has a problem in that it is trying to get into the big boys room in football and that has hurt its basketball conference. It really has. You can't spend all the money on football and then wonder why your basketball conference is falling behind. The Big Ten and SEC have a lot of resources and money and they have been able to spend to build both their football and basketball conferences. So far, looking at the commitment from the ACC schools, it seems like it has been an either/or proposition. It can't be, these schools need to figure out how to be viable in both sports. I am reading some horror stories about some schools in the ACC - Pitt might be one of them - looking to cut sports and do a number of things like that in order to survive. The Big East football conference could have been a thing but the people running the conference didn't understand that schools like Miami and Virginia Tech needed to be taken seriously in terms of what their priorities were.
5) One last thing, the Big East not inviting Penn State was a misstep but I firmly believe even if they had and Penn State joined the conference it would have been in the Big Ten by the end of the 1990s anyway. The powers that be at Penn State believed they fit best in the Big Ten, academically and athletically. So I think it is a stretch to say if Penn State had come, it would have changed everything because I think they would have come and gone and that might actually have moved the timeline up for the implosion of the conference.
I don't know what your thoughts are on this but would love to get them.
