The Day the Big East died

The 7 B-ball only Catholic schools have voted to kill or leave the Big East.  The league will be disbanded, and those 7 schools will together re-form a new conference that, per NCAA rules, will maintain its automatic bid to the Big Dance.  I would guess they will seek to selectively add some schools from other conferences, probably the A-10.  Butler, Xavier, U Mass, VCU, Dayton and St. Louis seem to be possibles.  My guess--and it is only that--is that they are very selective and add only Xavier to get to an 8 team conference.

What the football schools (Conn, USF, Cincinnati) and the incoming schools like Houston, UCF, Temple, SMU, Memphis and Tulane are supposed to do now, I have no idea.  Maybe they will stick together as a group of 9.  Adding the 4 incoming "football only" schools--Navy, San Diego State, East Carolina, and Boise--gets them to 13.  Enough to qualify for a championship football game and the money that comes with it.  So maybe those 13 will just stick it out despite seeming to have no natural rivalries, geographic consistency, or other common elements between them.

Truth be told, I don't really care what happens to the football schools (although Duke could end up with them if the ACC is poached to death).   What's important here is what the 7 are doing.

This is a brilliant, visionary move by the Catholic schools.  They are forgoing football revenue, which flies in the face of the new math of collegiate athletic economics.  In the place of a massive 12-16 team superconference, they will likely be returning to a more manageable 8-10 team conference.  A conference where there can be a double-round-robin schedule, which will enable a superior regular season product.  From a basketball standpoint, these teams are well matched.  The schools are sensibly combined from a geography standpoint.  There is a cultural commonality to big city northern schools.  They are all big-time basketball programs.   Where all the other conferences are trying to out "big" each other for football revenue, this group of 7 schools have just positioned themselves as the premier basketball conference in the country, playing by a different set of rules than the rest of the money-chasing gridiron guys.

The superconferences are the product of accountants.  This league will provide a product that pleases someone else--the customer.