In retrospect, this maybe should have serve as an early warning sign that Big East types were nearing the brink, but they seemed to have moved swiftly to acceptance -- SBN’s Syracuse blog says the Big East will cease to be by 2013:
Big Ten Expansion Reaction: Melodramatic Big East Edition
The only time someone broached the topic with Big East Commissioner John Marinatto, he quite literally said that he “doesn’t want to talk about this.” Well that’s too bad, John, cause everyone else does. This isn’t conjecture, it’s actually happening. Very soon. And by not doing something, anything, you’ve already shown your hand. The Big East is ripe for the plucking and it’s not going to put up much of a fight to stop you.
You need a simple reason to why Marinatto will do nothing? Here you go. He’s a Providence guy. Nothing wrong with being a Providence guy...except in this instance. This is a football and “big picture” discussion. Providence is on the wrong side of that discussion. They’re part of the small school, regional, traditional side of the Big East. The side that remembers when this was just all about basketball and nothing else. The side that cares so much about the history of the conference that it will do everything it can to maintain that. The side that only likes to think about the Big East in terms of how it was in the 80’s.
SBN’s Boston College blog also swings for the fences, in highly entertaining fashion, asking why the Big Ten doesn’t just attempt to absorb the entire Big East:
A Big Ten-Big East football mega-conference could never work, you say. But allow me to respond. You see, a 14 or 16-team Big Ten mega-conference is hardly a conference at all. It’s only a conference in the sense that the AFC or the NFC are considered conferences. It’s a loose affiliation of programs, where programs have unbalanced regular season schedules, and the top teams from each division within a conference play in a set postseason playoff.
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