Happy Big East Day!
The Story: UConn is back home again as it officially returned to the Big East at midnight!
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: If you didn’t know that was happening, why have you even subscribed to this newsletter? We are serious! This is a joyous occasion for the athletic department, which stayed with the football schools when the non-football schools split in 2013. Technically, the AAC is the legacy Big East, but it sold the name, branding and record books to the new Big East. The current Big East is basketball-focused and has had excellent success since its reincarnation, including a pair of national titles for Villanova in men’s basketball.
WHAT’S DIFFERENT? A lot. Two big rivals — Syracuse and Pittsburgh — are not in the conference. Louisville (ACC), West Virginia (Big 12) and Cincinnati (AAC) are also no longer in it. That said, Villanova, Providence, Seton Hall, St. John’s and Georgetown still give the conference a big-city college basketball footprint. DePaul and Marquette also remain from the old Big East.
WHAT’S NEW? Fans are going to like the new teams the Huskies will face in Butler, Creighton and Xavier. The conference has a Northeast and Midwest feel, which is a stark change from the South and Southwest-dominated AAC. Culturally, as UConn plays FBS football while no one else does, the Huskies’ fan base aligns more for basketball.
WINNERS? The basketball program and the fan base are the No. 1 winners. The fan base rejected the AAC. Yes, a lot of that was the losing at the end of Kevin Ollie‘s tenure, but the women’s team never lost an AAC game and the fans lost interest. The men’s basketball team’s attendance and the bottom of the AAC made life difficult from a recruiting and NCAA Tournament stance. UConn is a basketball school, no matter how hard people like us want to think differently. The fans want top-15-level basketball. Dan Hurley enters Year 3 with a stellar recruiting class, impact transfers and a top-25 schedule, along with potential All-America talent in James Bouknight. Soccer, volleyball and the Olympic sports will have far less travel and a more regional footprint. That’s going to be nice. Field hockey, a national championship contender, never left the Big East because the AAC didn’t sponsor the sport. The hockey teams are in Hockey East and don’t have to worry about a change.
LOSERS? The baseball and softball teams. AAC baseball was excellent and Jim Penders was able to play a national schedule and get at-large bids into the NCAA Tournament by facing top-25 programs in Houston, ECU and others. The baseball team moves into a nice, new stadium in Storrs, and we think Penders will continue to coach the best baseball program in New England. How it plays out is a matter of waiting, but we think baseball is something Penders has elevated into a national program.
The softball team was having its best season in years in the AAC and was 16-5 before the COVID-19 pandemic shut the season down. It was Laura Valentino‘s first season at UConn and the results were outstanding.
WHAT ABOUT FOOTBALL? We know the football team is the elephant in the room. UConn set a trend in college athletics by doing something that was perceived as not football focused (the horror!). We were initially skeptical about an independent schedule, but despite what national media writes, football is not doomed. The fan base rejected the AAC, and even though the quality of football in the AAC grew close to that in the old Big East, no one showed up. What was the point? Athletic director Dave Benedict put together an independent schedule and has more local and familiar teams on the schedule in future years.
Do you sense a theme? UConn has more regional and relevant rivalries and isn’t chasing the elusive College Football Playoff, which is never gonna happen anyway for a Group of 5 team. Is a Fiesta Bowl-like berth possible again? Probably not, but the chances of the Huskies getting to the top 25, winning the AAC title game and then being the top G5 team around is not likely every year, and the revenue the AAC was generating isn’t enough. Competitively, UConn is better positioned in the current environment and it looks like Randy Edsall is having no issues with the recruiting fallout. In fact, it doesn’t appear to have mattered at all.
OUR TAKE: In the last newsletter, we wrote that it isn’t a time to feel good about UConn athletics after four sports were proposed for cuts. This is something to feel good about. Football has to draw more fans and become more stable and we need the Huskies back in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a four-year absence. But this feels right, normal and sensible for the university. Is this perfect? No. UConn is a P5 institution athletically and has better athletic departments than some schools in those coveted spots do. That’s a gripe for another day, and right now, we like UConn’s athletic future better than we did 13 months ago.
