Nice Q&A with Delany and his thoughts on the origins of realignment. It's a paywall but here's the segment on the Big East.
For Delany, modern realignment begins with two events, both of which predate his days with the Big Ten. The Big East’s formation on May 31, 1979, came one week before the OVC hired him as its commissioner. The Big East chose eight urban basketball-first members, and in concert with ESPN’s debut in September 1979, the league found national footing on television. The other marker came on June 2, 1984, when the United States Supreme Court ruled the NCAA violated the Sherman Act by price fixing and placing artificial limits on its membership through its television policy.
Both events work collectively to set the course for the 198 Division I football moves since 1990.
Delany: The first thing I would say is CFA defeats NCAA. That would be No. 1. No. 2, I think, maybe even No. 1 is a precursor to ’84, the founding of the Big East by Dave Gavitt on a media-based conference. They were mostly Catholic but not exclusively. They were on the East Coast. And TV underlined it. And there was no football involved; it was just basketball.
But the same year the Big East did that, you know what was founded? ESPN. So I would say ’79 begins to lay the foundation for a new media entity in ESPN and a conference based on media markets.
The Big East was lucrative in the early 1980s and had to fend off an attempt from then Penn State football coach/athletic director Joe Paterno to pick off Boston College and Syracuse to form an all-sports Eastern league involving Pittsburgh, Rutgers, West Virginia, Virginia Tech and the Nittany Lions. Gavitt secured Syracuse and Boston College by inviting Pittsburgh on Nov. 18, 1981. It killed Paterno’s attempt.
The next year, Penn State sought admission into the Big East. Six of the eight Big East members had to vote yes on Penn State. Basketball-only schools Georgetown, St. John’s and Villanova voted no, which kept Penn State out. Its ripple effect was profound when Penn State was accepted as a Big Ten member in 1990.
Delany: If Penn State is with Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Boston College … the East Coast is stabilized, and the Big Ten doesn’t have many places to move. So you have a more formidable, a more stable Big East. But in my view, that inability to see that future and the importance of football made the Big East very vulnerable.
Notre Dame doesn’t ever move.
Florida State doesn’t move in my view if Penn State doesn’t move. The SEC was already good with their little move (
Arkansas and South Carolina). And Florida State is not going to be pursued by the ACC. I’m saying none of that happens if the Big East expands properly to eight football schools and 12 basketball schools. But their rationale was, that’s too many schools. Eight and 12. Isn’t that kind of quaint?
It would have changed history probably in the sense that if the East were consolidated with football, and you had Syracuse, Boston College, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, Penn State, maybe West Virginia, and they had full basketball schools, the Big East publics, plus the Catholics plus Penn State and few others, arguably there would have been no vacuum there.
