RSS 2.0 Feed
Looking into the crystal ball with Paul Hewitt
If you’re Georgia Tech’s Paul Hewitt and you’re considering the St. John’s head coaching job, how much, if at all, will the rumors of conferences realigning impact your decision?
On the one hand, if you take the job you'll be the big man on campus because there is no football program to contend with at the Queens, NY school. On the other, if the Big 10 Conference does indeed expand and cherry picks one or more Big East football members from the fold, suddenly you'll find yourself transported from the relative stability of the ACC to a possibly fractured situation where the remaining football members are scrambling to find another conference to call home. When the dust settles, the Big East could be minus Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Notre Dame, Rutgers, West Virginia, and who knows where Louisville, Cincinnati, UConn and South Florida might end up. If you're Hewitt, that might give you pause. But then consider the basketball schools that are left behind: DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John's, Seton Hall and Villanova, each with a proud basketball tradition. That's not too shabby.
Imagine then if St. John's and the other remaining schools stuck together with the purpose of birthing something even more special on the college hoops scene. Since seven members alone are not enough to make up an attractive conference slate, they could move to improve the competitive product and to draw the required media interest (and dollars!) by expanding the Big East with members who have similar goals in terms of their marquee sport (basketball), their athletic department budgets, their traditions, and their natural geographic rivalries. So picture this: let's start at the western most school in this futuristic vision of the Big East and work our way, well, east.
Travelling eastward from Marquette and DePaul, there are other notable Division I basketball programs such as St. Louis, Xavier, Dayton, Duquesne, St. Joseph's and George Washington, plus add in a growing program like Siena and you have two seven team divisions made up of schools whose most successful and recognizable Division I program is men's basketball. (Okay, okay...it sounds like a CYO league from the 1960s, but we're talking roundball here, Father!) Naturally this would decimate the Atlantic-10 basketball conference, but its members with football already have other conference affiliations and Fordham and St. Bonaventure can be added to the Big East assuming not all of the A-10 basketball schools listed join. The big hurt to the Big East comes if and when the Big Ten expands aggressively as is rumored and the ACC then follows suit. The Big East basketball schools left behind will have little choice but to act quickly. If they do, Paul Hewitt can expect to compete in a thriving basketball-dominated conference that will capture the attention of fans from New York to Chicago, and beyond. If they don't, Hewitt will be looking for the first subway out of Queens.