"Big East Teams Leave Conference for Sports Allies With Lucrative TV Market"

From Bloomberg


Review by James Hemphill in KIN 332 (Section 1)


Two of the most important universities from the Big East Conference decided to leave the conference for the greener pastures of the Atlantic Coach Conference. These institutions are Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh. With this realignment, the ACC is attempting to blanket the entire east coast from Boston to Miami with its product. The ACC commissioner is attempting to move the conference tournament to the Mecca of basketball: Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The departures of these two crucial universities from the Big East has upset many pure college sports fan because they are leaving the tradition of the league and the rivalries that have grown since the inception of the league. Syracuse is one of the founding members of the Big East, and will be very difficult to replace. Not only did the Big East lose these two schools, but there is talk that Rutgers and Connecticut could be next to leave. Just yesterday, the Big East received some more bad news as Texas Christian University decided to forgo their acceptance to the Big East for the more appropriate conference geographically speaking in the Big Twelve. With the departures of these marquee programs, they will have to be creative to rebuild the league. The Big East is still intending on expanding their football conference by potentially offering bids to Central Florida, East Carolina, Navy, Temple, Air Force and even Villanova. The Big East is simply in turmoil as a football conference at the moment and has a lot of work to be completed to fix the perception of the league.

The ACC is booming right now with fourteen universities going forward and possibly two more when realignment is completed. By reaching ninety million people along the Atlantic Coast, it has a lot of bargaining power to ensure that a much larger television deal is agreed upon in the upcoming years. It is conceivable that the ACC could become the first super conference with sixteen institutions and that ultimately could allocate for four super conferences of sixteen members each.

Where does the Big East go from here some may ask. They are already hurt by the fact that they are the only major conference that puts more emphasis on basketball then football, because football ultimately makes more money for the conference. They need to react quickly to these departures and figure out a method to lure the best football programs and rejuvenate a conference that has been decimated by realignment over the past decade.

From a marketing perspective, the Atlantic Coach Conference will have a much broader audience to appeal to fans with Syracuse and Pittsburgh joining the conference. This will allocate the ACC to market their product to the large media outlets of Pittsburgh and New York City. If the ACC Tournament is moved to Madison Square Garden, the conference will be able to promote the event to strong alumni bases in the New York City Metropolitan Area. On the other hand, the Big East will be hurt significantly with the departures of these two vital universities. They must lure in popular schools to ensure that the Big East brand, especially in football, does not fall apart and cause further departures to occur. They must hope for the loyalty of the conference to take precedence over the fact that two of its most popular universities have abandon the conference for basically more money and better opportunities.