Cuse Country

Ahem…

WRONG!

Wrong wrong wrong wrong.

(Yeah, I’m biting off that Comedy Central ad. Sue me.)

There are a couple bits of flotsam floating in the Big East blogosphere courtesy of Sean at Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician and his counterpart Jon at Bleed Scarlet (a Rutgers joint). The two of them traded questions and answers, some of which centered around the choice of John Marinatto as the next commissioner of the Big East. Sean asked Jon a couple of open-ended questions:

1. John Marinatto. Your initial thoughts?
2. If you were named Big East Commish instead, what would be the three most important things you’d want to accomplish?

Here are some highlights of Jon’s responses:

1. The selection of Marinatto is troubling… [It] signifies acceptance of the status quo, which means chaos and overcrowding on the (very successful) basketball end, and football continuing to be a lower priority….Even though the selection of Marinatto was announced as unanimous, my suspicion is that the basketball-only schools forced this selection past any resistance. Now the football schools need to start looking towards the future, and strongly consider splitting the conference in two.

2. The Big East is a crowded 16-team behemoth at this point. Basketball is successful, but the sheer strength and depth of the league might hold down its number of bids in March, in addition to creating a scheduling nightmare. The prime emphasis on basketball has led to football being neglected. The Big East needs to split in two, with the basketball and football schools agreeing to go their separate ways…. Ed. Note: this was the #2 thing on Jon’s list of three things, after securing better bowl tie-ins.

He then goes on to describe various scenarios about how this could happen (adding Xavier to hoops to make 9 teams would be easy; it would be much harder to find a legitimate 9th in football because there is little to offer in C-USA and no Big 10/ACC teams are going to bolt; etc.).

Jon’s welcome to his opinion but I’m just as welcome to tell him he’s totally wrong.

What is this “scheduling nightmare” and “chaos” that he refers to on the basketball side? Seems to me they’ve come up with a pretty workable solution where you play every team at least once. Granted, it would be nice to be able to play every team twice as in the days of old, but that’s a concession that I think everyone is willing to make in return for the unfathomable basketball awesomeness of the conference. Seven teams in the top 25 — THREE TEAMS IN THE TOP FIVE — and three others thought to be contenders as well. That doesn’t sound like “chaos” to me.

Now, about the number of NCAA bids. There have been years in the recent past where deserving Big East teams were left out of the tournament because their schedule was “brutal” and they didn’t accrue enough conference wins. But those were years when only a few BE teams were considered top-25 material in any case. This year, the Big East will likely end up beating up on each other — probably nobody is going to go 26-2 — but unlike the past, now it’s getting the massive amount of respect that used to be regularly accorded the ACC, and would lead to things like an 18-12 NC State squad being chosen for the NCAAs. I think this could easily be a 9-bid season, as long as the middle teams take care of their OOC business and grab a couple games from the upper echelon squads. And even if it’s not, if there is a good team that nevertheless ends up with a poor conference record because they couldn’t beat any of the top-25 teams on their schedule, and is left out of the Tournament, does that mean the solution is to weaken the conference so that there is a lower level of competition? Of course not. Build up your program and come back to fight again next year.

Now, Jon does admit that the basketball side of the conference is very successful. Barely. In one of his answers the success is a parenthetical aside; in the other it’s immediately followed by a “but”. My question to Jon is this: do you think that all this success is an accident? Do you think that it’s a coincidence that three years after the formation of the 16-team league (which began play in fall 2005) the conference has achieved this unprecedented level of strength? As soon as it happened, recruiting began to shoot up. The 16-team league is attractive to recruits, who know that no matter who is ‘up’ or ‘down’ in a given year, there are enough teams to ensure that they will be playing against some elite competition. Not to mention the media coverage that has resulted. Or perhaps you forgot about this part. In summer 2006 — after the first year of the 16-team league — the conference signed its TV deal with ESPN guaranteeing that every single conference basketball game would be broadcast on the WWL in some capacity (including online). You can’t underestimate what a boon to recruiting it is to be able to tell a kid that every single game of his will be on TV. That’s tons of exposure to pro scouts, not counting the bonus that ESPN-produced games are more likely to get highlights on SportsCenter. Plus there is the human aspect, i.e. your parents, family, and friends are going to be able to watch every game.

As for football, I see little evidence that it has been “neglected” by Tranghese and his administration. This year is a down year, no question, and the league would definitely benefit from improving the quality of the bowl games with which it has agreements. But it was just two years ago that three teams were undefeated heading into the last month of the season, and just last year that WVU was on the brink of playing for the BCS Championship. The league has done pretty well the last couple years in bowl games too. There’s room for improvement but “neglected” is hardly the word I’d pick. In fact, I think the conventional wisdom is that the football conference has done remarkably well recovering from the loss of two of its most highly successful programs.

Would football be better with a ninth team? Probably. It would enable the balanced schedule of 4 home and 4 away conference games that is the ideal in the sport. I’d be cool with adding a ninth team as a “football-only” school, but that option doesn’t seem viable at present. But it’s a giant stretch to say that football is being hurt by the lack of a ninth team just because there are no national contenders in the conference this season.

Jon apparently feels that the basketball-only schools are holding the football schools hostage somehow, preventing them from doing what’s in their best interests. Or at the very least that the presence of so many basketball-only schools gives the conference’s dealings a decidedly pro-basketball tilt. I think what he really means is that the schools with shitty basketball teams but decent football programs (i.e. Rutgers) wish the two-sport balance was tipped in the other direction. That kind of bias is understandable, considering that Rutgers has been unable to field a competitive basketball team since (roughly) the Carter administration. But the Big East was founded on basketball. Basketball is, and will remain for a long time, the lifeblood of the conference’s existence. Hell, there has only been a Big East football conference for 17 years; the conference has been in existence for 30. I will grant that it might make sense for Rutgers and USF, and possibly West Virginia, to be in a football-focused conference, since football is the strength of their athletic programs. But it would be ridiculous for SU, UConn, Pitt, Louisville, and even Cincinnati, to sacrifice the elite level of basketball competition that they enjoy just to have a ninth football team to play with.

Jon was curious about that last point from a Syracuse perspective. When he asked Sean some questions, this was one of them:

4. Syracuse is in a unique position in the Big East: their fans still crave a winning football team, but Syracuse has been on top of the basketball food chain for a long time. Does the status quo of the Big East, with a crowded 16-team basketball conference, and the football programs on shaky ground, work for Syracuse athletics? Did the Big East make a mistake in promoting John Marinatto to replace the retiring Mike Tranghese, instead of bringing in an outsider with more of a football background?

If you had any lingering doubts about where Jon stands on this issue, this incredibly biased and leading question ought to put those to bed. But I’m done refuting Jon’s point. What shocked me about this was not the question, but Sean’s answer:

I’ll let you in on the dark, dirty secret that Syracuse fans don’t want you to know…

We’d trade the basketball program’s success for football success in a heartbeat.

Ahem.

WRONG!

Wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Sean continued:

Don’t get me wrong, we don’t take Jim Boeheim and his fantastic teams for granted. We love us some SU basketball and we live and die by their success (or lack thereof). But Syracuse, NY is in Upstate New York…Football Country. And in the 50’s and early 60’s, Syracuse Football was the shit long before Syracuse Basketball really became the consistent winner it is these days….

As someone who was born and raised in Syracuse, I can vouch that basketball, not football, is the prime mover of the local athletic scene. Hell, even my high school (alma mater of Super Bowl champ Dorsey Levens) drew bigger crowds for basketball games than football games — sound familiar? To a Syracuse resident, the basketball program is our passion. Success in football is great but we can live without it. My bet would be that missing the NCAA tournament the last two years bothers the average local fan more than the football team’s recent issues.

Now, I will admit to being a little oversimplified in that analysis. I should clarify. Sean is correct, obviously, when he says that football was The Game in the 50s. (Though it bears pointing out that, in that regard, it is in line with simple historical trends — in the 50s, college football was second only to baseball in national prominence. There was far more interest in college football than PRO football at that time — the NFL, though it had been around since the 20s, was just taking off. The NBA was barely underway.) So, to Syracusans of a certain age, of course football is the more important sport. But to anyone under 45, the SU program that you most identify with is the basketball program. The football program hit its decline in the late 60s and continued to be mediocre throughout the 70s and early 80s, sneaking into only a couple of bowl games before the dream season of 1987 heralded a renaissance of approximately a decade. Then the program fell back into mediocrity (Music City Bowl anyone?), and now worse. Meanwhile, the basketball program has had 38 consecutive winning seasons.

THIRTY-EIGHT CONSECUTIVE WINNING SEASONS.

It’s a current record streak, by the way. If we can (God and Boeheim willing) manage to keep it up for another 16 years, we’ll eclipse the record held by UCLA. And you’d throw that away for the football team? I suppose that if, in 1971, you’d asked Syracuse fans whether they’d rather have 38 consecutive winning seasons in football vs. in basketball, there would have been a major preference for football. I understand that, I do. But the fact of the matter is that history has wrought a sea change in the opinions and outlook of the Syracuse fan. An entire generation has grown up with a winning, nationally competitive, prestigious, worth-of-devotion basketball team, in an equally worthy basketball conference. Those same folks grew up with a football team that, due to their overall lack of success, became second fiddle in their hearts and minds. So if you were to pose the same question to fans today, I’m pretty sure basketball would come out on top.

If you need more convincing, you need to read our article from a few weeks ago proving, with scientific certainty, that there is nothing in the world as awesome as Syracuse basketball.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find out how the field hockey team is doing in the first round of the NCAAs.