Likely demise of the Big East is likely big news for Hofstra

When the dominoes stop falling, odds are good the Atlantic 10 will be Hofstra's new athletic home.

This gives me an alibi five, 10 or 15 Septembers from now, when we’re all sitting around with our robotic overlords waxing poetic about where we were when college basketball as we knew it began changing. Now I can say I was at my laptop writing a piece about how it would impact Hofstra instead of declaring I was watching “Gilmore Girls” on something called a SoapNet, which may actually end up outlasting the current incarnation of the Big East.

Shut up. In the words of Chris Turk: “Mothers and daughters: They speak so fast but they speak so true.”

Anyway, the news Saturday afternoon that Pittsburgh and Syracuse have applied for membership in the Atlantic Coast Conference and that they will be welcomed into the ACC as soon as today is finally the domino for which we’ve been waiting to fall. The inevitable, football-fueled renovation of Division I in which four superconferences lord over everyone else has begun.

There will be a lot of speculation over how the new Division I will look, an exercise in which we will gladly partake very soon, as well as a lot of lamenting over how today represents the end of the innocence for college athletics. There will be none of that here.

Is the college sports landscape changing for the worse? Of course. Is it disappointing that money trumps tradition? Of course. But money has run the world since the dawn of time, so it’s just wasted pixels to wail and moan over how wrong it will be to see Jim Boeheim, who was dourly stalking the sideline at Syracuse before there was even a Big East, in unfamiliar arenas in Durham and Chapel Hill and Miami (snicker snicker snort snort).

And college athletics hasn’t been innocent in decades. The good ol’ black and white days featured point shaving at the Mecca. Sam Gilbert paved the way for the Nevin Shapiros of the world even as John Wooden constructed a dynasty and an impeccable reputation at UCLA. The world has always been impure and it will keep turning. A generation from now someone will bemoan how wrong it is that Syracuse or Pitt left its ACC tradition behind to join the Big 120. Spare me.

Now for the good stuff: How this all shakes out and how, in particular, it impacts Hofstra. What, you thought I cared about the Big East all of a sudden? While most of the talk about the superconferences has been centered on what would happen once the Big XII blew up, for our purposes, we’ve only focused on the Big East and how it would shape Hofstra’s future.

Had the Big East been a proactive force in creating the four superconferences, it would have meant more purgatory for Hofstra. Now that the Big East is about to be picked apart like a Thanksgiving turkey on Black Friday, there’s an endgame resolution in sight that gets Hofstra out of the Southern Bias Conference.

People smarter than me—line forms to the left—insist this process will take years to unfold and that there’s no guarantee the Big East is done as a football/basketball powerhouse. As usual, I will insist that people smarter than me are wrong.

This time though I might be right, because if there’s one thing we can all agree upon, it’s that these conference changes aren’t going to drag out. It took 21 months for Boston College to leave the Big East for the ACC. My guess, with the stakes even higher during this round of realignment, is that Pittsburgh and Syracuse will be in the ACC next fall along with two other schools. The Pac-12 will be the Pac-16, the SEC will also have 16 teams and the Big 10 will be coming up with a new design that subliminally reminds us its names is very, very inaccurate.

The Big East barely had a football pulse with Pitt and Syracuse. It’s possible the league will still try and maintain its BCS standing by poaching a chunk of what is left of the Big XII, but according to my admittedly meager math skills, 64 does not divide equally into five. The ACC just finished off the Big East.

Who knows which of the BCS schools ends up where, but for Hofstra’s purposes, the path to the Atlantic 10—at least from where I sit, where I am, again, just having some fun speculating—just got a lot clearer. Here’s a three-step process that finally gets Hofstra into the conference it has longed after for decades.

1.) The A-10 will be targeted by the non-football Big East schools, which will look to strengthen what will still be one of the best basketball leagues in the country. The following is also an almost perfect alignment because every school but one is a Catholic university:

BIG EAST

Dayton (A-10)

Saint Louis (A-10)

Temple (A-10)

Xavier (A-10)

DePaul

Georgetown

Marquette

Notre Dame

Providence

St. John’s

Seton Hall

Villanova

2.) The current A-10 alignment will take another hit when the CAA finally quits with the Boston-to-Atlanta charade and solidifies itself as a Virginia-based, mid-Atlantic behemoth by taking two A-10 schools—including the school that jumpstarted the whole round of conference realignment that landed Hofstra in the CAA in the first place—and a Southern Conference school. This also further cements the CAA as the best Division I-AA conference in the land.

CAA

Charlotte (A-10)

Richmond (A-10)

Appalachian State (Southern Conference)

Delaware

George Mason

Georgia State

James Madison

UNC Wilmington

Old Dominion

Towson

VCU

William & Mary

3.) The Atlantic 10, now down to eight, invites the CAA’s three northern outsiders as well as Boston University, whose long-term home has long been tied to Northeastern’s. This also keeps the Atlantic 10 located ENTIRELY along the Atlantic seaboard—what a concept!—which will be no small consideration as the recession enters its second decade.

ATLANTIC 10

HOFSTRA (CAA)

Drexel (CAA)

Northeastern (CAA)

Boston U. (America East)

Duquesne

Fordham

George Washington

LaSalle

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

St. Bonaventure

Saint Joseph’s

At the very least, this new alignment makes for some juicy immediate rivalries. Imagine getting to see Chaz Williams and Halil Kanacevic at least once a year, or Tom Pecora twice a year. And I’d love to see what the Northeastern student section would come up with to greet Duquesne and ex-NU coach Ron Everhart, who famously took everything to Pittsburgh with him except the bathroom sinks at Matthews Arena.

Of course, there are many wrinkles to this plan. Notre Dame probably ends up in the Big 10 if it decides to give up independence in football. Some of the CAA schools may be lured by the idea of playing lower-level I-A football, which seems like an awful, awful idea if all the power will be consolidated in the four superconferences. But it could happen, which would turn a place like Conference USA into a potential destination for the likes of Old Dominion, James Madison and Georgia State.

The last step—and the only one we care about—is fraught with complications. I doubt very much Fordham has any interest in welcoming Hofstra to the A-10, and in the past the A-10 has been about as interested in Hofstra as the homecoming queen was in me 20-odd years ago.

But the A-10 may be in survival mode in a matter of days and weeks and have no choice but to welcome some new dance partners to the floor. Boston College’s departure to the ACC in 2003 unleashed a torrent of realignment in just a matter of months. By November, the Big East had lured six schools from Conference USA while Charlotte and Saint Louis agreed to leave C-USA for the A-10.

The dominoes are going to fall even quicker this time around. My suggestion, if you’ve been putting off a trip to Richmond for the CAA Tournament, is to book that trip now. Because if I was a betting man—you’ll get that analogy in a second!—I’d wager that by March 2013, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll only have to go to Atlantic City to see Hofstra in its conference tournament.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Bits and Bytes: Waiting For The Sun edition

Not sure how much longer I'll be able to play off the one Jayhawks song I know...

Pardon my absence the last few weeks. I just figured I wouldn’t return to posting until the sun returned from behind the clouds.

Seriously, sorry for the protracted hiatus and very sorry I didn’t have something on the OOC up earlier. I intended to post a Bits and Bytes last Sunday night, but the hotel my wife and I were staying at had wireless Internet straight out of 1998. Then I spent a couple days in Connecticut and boom, it was almost July 4.

I’ve also been busy at my Red Sox blog, especially now that my book is out (cue trumpets). If you like the Red Sox and/or you like me—and even if you don’t!— please consider buying yourself a copy or 500 so that I can put off getting a Real Job a little while longer. Seriously, I think it turned out pretty well, so if you’re interested in the Red Sox and the media, check out the book as well as the blog and let me know what you think.

That’s enough self-promotion for today. Here’s some other Bits and Bytes that have piled up:

—On the list of lame clichés, marveling at how fast time is flying ranks just below talking about the weather. So now I’ve done both! Hooray for me! Hard to believe, but as of this morning we are officially less than two months away from the football opener. And as of late this week, we’ll be more than halfway through the basketball off-season. Whoohoo.

—My good friend Tommy the KU Grad has been checking the blog lately and talking all sorts of trash. What a bully. Dude is 15 months removed from watching his team win a national championship—its first one in 20 years, he suffered so much—and he’s flexing his muscles by picking on innocent Hofstra fans like us who never ever said anything mean about the Jayhawks, nuh-uh, not once.

I gotta give him credit, though, for reading the blog enough to actually identify three Hofstra players other than Speedy Claxton! Look forward to much more banter between Tommy and I over the next 130 days (again, not that I’m excited, or anything).

—Tommy should be careful how much he chirps, because the Jayhawks already look vulnerable thanks to a spate of dysfunction and dissension! That’s the New York spin on the news that Xavier and C.J. Henry, the hotly hyped brothers who chose to leave Memphis for Kansas once John Calipari bolted to Kentucky with NCAA investigators bearing down on Memphis, almost left Kansas after a Kansas City Star story in which they were portrayed—in their own words—as having no interest in academics and looking at college as a one-and-done situation.

A basketball factory like Kansas may have student-athletes who aren’t at all into the first part of the equation? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you! Self has apparently mended fences—though, reading between the lines in the first link in the above graph, it sounds like he has no use for Carl Henry, the father of Xavier and C.J. and a former KU star himself. And quite frankly, it’s hard to blame him, given how Carl Henry seems to be doing a bang-up job of essaying the controlling, overbearing stage dad.

But hey, as a Hofstra alum, I encourage Carl Henry to bug the hell out of Self between now and Nov. 13! Maybe he’ll pull his kids out of school and a bunch of the Jayhawks’ other All-American candidates will follow and Self will have to send out the student manager to fill out a starting five! This is just the beginning of the crumbling Jayhawks empire, Tommy!!

—Speaking of controversial recruits, Lance Stephenson finally landed somewhere: Cincinnati. The Bearcats signing recruits with more baggage than Samsonite? Did Bob Huggins go back there when nobody was looking? Seriously, I can’t think of a bigger red flag than St. John’s—which is in screaming need of a local star to raise its fortunes and national profile—passing on the chance to sign Stephenson at a discount (pun possibly intended).

The Daily News wrote about Stephenson’s meandering journey two weeks ago Sunday. At the end of the lengthy feature, former Adidas guru Sonny Vaccaro implores Stephenson to go somewhere, even a local school off the big-time D-I path. “Manhattan, Seton Hall, Hofstra,” Vaccaro said. I picture Hofstra officials cringing at that line and wondering how politely and pointedly they can tell Vaccaro to mind his own business.

—Hofstra’s future conference affiliation is touched on directly and indirectly in this interesting story from The Providence Journal about the future of athletics at the University of Rhode Island. URI’s outgoing president, Robert Carothers, says he expects the Colonial to eventually add Charlotte, that Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz “…wants to get out of the Colonial altogether” and join the A-10, which is a move Carothers would support. Carothers also expressed hope that a travel-friendly all-sports Yankee Conference could be formed.

Of course, Carothers’ opinion is now as valuable as the rest of ours, but it’s interesting that the idea of blowing up the D-I landscape isn’t unique to bloggers like me. Also notable is that URI AD Thorr Bjorn wonders what will happen to the northern-based CAA football schools once Old Dominion and Georgia State join the league and expand it to 14 members.

Asked if the northern schools might form their own league, Bjorn said “…as of right now, we have no immediate plans to change,” which sure sounds like it’s being pondered for a few years down the road. Stay tuned.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

Bits and Bytes: The Conference Shuffle

Drexel in the Big 5! I'm such an idiot!

The headline to the article by Dick “best toupee in sports journalism” Weiss in the Sunday Daily News doesn’t leave much room for interpretation: “New conference home is what Hofstra needs to take hoops program to the next level.” Like the rest of us, Weiss doesn’t know exactly how this will happen, only that it should.

My favorite part of the article was the ancient photo of Pecora the News used. No, not one of him from Adelphi, but one in which Aurimas Kieza is in the background. I really would have been impressed if they managed to find one of Pecora with, say, Chris McRae in the background. Oh yeah. Bet you didn’t think you’d read that name today did you?

The most interesting part, meanwhile, was Pecora saying he worries the CBI and CIT will give the NCAA—which now owns the NIT—the excuse to turn the NIT into the JV tournament for the Big Six and relegate the mid-majors to the pay-to-plays.

That makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate Pecora still toeing the company line about why Hofstra didn’t accept a bid to either tourney. But still: Pecora still thought the CBI and CIT were good ideas for a team such as his in February. And if these fledgling tournaments that may admittedly be to college basketball what the Garden State Bowl was to college football were good enough for Old Dominion, then they should have been good enough for Hofstra.

Enough about that. A couple other bits and bytes about the conference shuffle we pondered last week:

—Thanks to Gonzo Hofstra Fan, a Loyal Reader who correctly points out that Drexel is not a member of the Big 5. Penn is, along with Villanova, Temple, St. Joseph’s and LaSalle. However, in my defense, Wikipedia—which is never wrong—states that Drexel has become something of an unofficial honorary (is that redundant?) member of the Big 5 and that it is part of the City 6, a term I’d never before heard. I hope Drexel does join the Big 5 and that the schools are still referred to as the Big 5. That would be very A-10ish.

—Isolated rumble or the beginning of the nationwide seismic conference changes? Campbell is leaving the Atlantic Sun for the Big South. Hmmm.

—The Patriot League going the full scholarship route in football in order to get back a school that never should have left sounds good in theory, but a closer read of Lehigh Football Nation’s excellent and in-depth post about the financial difficulties several Patriot League schools are experiencing makes me less certain that Fordham will be able to return. Schools that are pleading poverty can’t very easily add scholarships to football programs that are probably losing money already. An obvious compromise would be to accept Fordham back into the Patriot in everything but football, but does that solve anything for a school that looks as if it’s ready to make football its marquee sport? Might it be better in the long run for Fordham to find an all-sports home rather than going independent in football or trying to find a conference where it is not a geographic fit, a la Stony Brook in the Big South?

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!