NEWS ITEM: Providence College Athletic Director Dave Gavitt announces the formation of a new conference comprising seven traditional basketball powers in the East. Some refer to it as the ”Super Conference,” and others, as the ”Super Seven” or the ”Big Eastern.” Soon enough, it will simply be called the ”Big East.”
That was May of 1979, and college basketball in the East was an unfocused giant under attack on many fronts. It had only a tradition, a tradition borne of its status as the cradle of the game, but beyond that it had little and existed in the shadows of the Big 10, the Pac-10 and the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Its one conference, the Eastern Collegiate Athletic (ECAC), was an unwieldy conglomerate of 40 teams, and it lacked both the prestige and the drawing power of its rivals. So it was no surprise that the East`s best prep prospects were skipping off to those rivals, nor that the pro teams dominated those markets they shared with universities. Now, in addition, came a directive from the NCAA, a directive demanding that the teams in the ECAC play home-and-home series with their division rivals if it wished to retain its automatic bid to the NCAA`s postseason tourney.
That order was impalatable to those members with national programs and would have forced just one of them, in this case St. John`s, to make seven scheduling changes in order to comply. ”That,” said its athletic director, Jack Kaiser, ”was the stimulus. If they hadn`t forced that scheduling down our throats, there would have been no reason to think of leaving (the ECAC).” But St. John`s did leave and became a member of this new conference, along with Boston College, Connecticut, Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall and Syracuse. Less than a year later, Villanova signed on as well, and then this group grew to nine with the addition of Pittsburgh in 1982.
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”When we started,” Gavitt, now its commissioner, recalls, ”we had our tradition, and we thought bringing that tradition under one conference would make us competitive. We thought it would help keep some kids at home and keep some of the schools from being overwhelmed by the pro teams in their markets.”
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS I: Dave Gavitt makes a proposal to North Carolina State Athletic Director Willis Casey, a powerful voice in the powerful ACC. How `bout, he proposes, our schools getting together for a series of games?
”There wasn`t much sentiment for it in the ACC,” Gavitt remembers.
”Their feeling was, `Who the hell are these guys?` ”
That was 1981, and to the ACC, the Big East was a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes. It was true that three of its teams had finished in the Top 20 in its very first year, yet it was still a conference in search of that reputation long possessed by the ACC.
It had been the first with a syndicated television package, a coup it managed in the `50s, and also the first with its own network contract, which it signed two decades later. Its own postseason tourney was then generally regarded as the finest in the country, and if all that wasn`t enough, they had the erudite Dean (Smith) coaching at Carolina, and good-ol` Lefty (Driesell)
doing the same at Maryland, and Big Ralph (Sampson) playing at Virginia, and a couple of hotshots named Krzyzewski and Valvano just getting started at Duke and N.C. State.
So, no, the ACC had no need to get into bed with this newcomer, nor was it particularly anxious to help it establish an identity by linking its own tradition to the Big East. That was the big reason behind Gavitt`s proposal, a desire to push his new conference`s identity, but after the rebuff, he and it were forced to do that alone.
Already, by that spring of `81, they had a niche, a not-unimpressive achievement for a 2-year-old conference with two full-time employees. But now came the 16 months that would firmly sear this babe into the firmament of college basketball.
The process began when Patrick Ewing, the nation`s top high school player, chose Georgetown as his college, and it expanded when 10 of the East`s top 13 prep players chose to play in the Big East. It reached a peak when Ewing and his Hoyas lost a memorable title game to North Carolina the following spring and was concretized during the summer when the league signed the richest TV contracts in its sport`s history.
Now, by the start of only its fourth season, it was a prestigious conference, a powerful conference, a conference televised nationwide, and its reputation only grew with Georgetown`s title in `84 and Villanova`s a year later. ”What I hoped would happen,” reflects Gavitt, ”did happen. What I didn`t foresee is how fast it happened.”
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS II: Dave Gavitt continues to harbor the idea of a series of games between the Big East and the ACC, and he brings it up again in 1985. ”That time,” he recalls, ”I was brushed off by my own league.”
Gene Corrigan, the athletic director of Notre Dame, was named commissioner of the ACC in the summer of 1987, and soon he and Gavitt were kicking around the idea his Big East counterpart wouldn`t let die. ”I liked it from the beginning. It was something to put a little spice into the early part of the year,” he recalls, and then he chuckles. ”It was also something to give me indigestion, but when you were an athletic director as long as I`d been, you`re used to indigestion.”
The following May, he proposed the idea to his coaches, and though some initially balked at adding a tough game to their already tough schedules, they eventually warmed to the idea and embraced the proposed series. Gavitt, however, was getting a significantly cooler reception from his own coaches, and when the ACC`s reconvened 13 months ago, they were anxious and
inquisitive. ”What`s going on? Haven`t we got it?” they asked Corrigan.
”There seems to be a holdup. They aren`t sure what they want to do,”
Corrigan told them.
”It`s a great idea. See what you can do,” his coaches asserted.
Some privately told him to arrange a series with the Big 10 if the Big East remained recalcitrant, but now Gavitt wielded his considerable clout, twisted some reluctant arms and wrung out his coaches` acquiescence. ”Some were less than excited and say I railroaded them. Having coached, I understand that,” he now admits. ”Their reluctance was, `Hey, why do I need one more tough game.` Or, as (Syracuse coach) Jim Boeheim said, `One more media moment.` ”
ESPN assured that this ACC/Big East Challenge (as it came to be called)
would be just that when it signed a four-year, nearly $7 million contract to televise the series, which kicked off Monday in Hartford, Conn., and continues Wednesday in Greensboro, N.C. No. 1 Syracuse against No. 7 Duke, that is the highlight of that night`s action, and on Thursday at the Meadowlands, No. 3 Georgetown meets No. 17 North Carolina.
”Both conferences have been innovators, at the cutting edge,” Gavitt says now, explaining why this series was so attractive to him. ”If this fails, it fails, but at least we went out to the edge.”
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”It`s something new. We should be in front of it,” says Corrigan, explaining the same. ”And it`s a great deal. Four teams in the Top 20. How the hell else could you put that together?”