Lawsuit about more than feeling jilted

On Friday, June 6, Pitt and four other Big East universities filed suit against Boston… On Friday, June 6, Pitt and four other Big East universities filed suit against Boston College and the University of Miami as “a last resort to protect sports programs placed in profound jeopardy” by the rogue colleges’ conduct. The rationale: they promised they’d stay in the Big East, and now they might move to the Atlantic Coast Conference.

At first, this might seem like a juvenile argument among grade-schoolers. Can we sue Ben Howland for leaving when he said he wouldn’t? Steve Pederson? Marc Boehm? Where does this chain stop?

This is about more than just Pitt, Rutgers, West Virginia, Virginia Tech and Connecticut feeling jilted, though. It’s about the same reason Miami and Boston College are leaving: money.

The Big East is on the verge of being a powerful conference. With the men’s, women’s and NIT champions, it’s arguably the best basketball conference in the nation. Add that to perennial championship contender Miami and three of the fastest-rising football programs in the country (Pitt, WVU and Tech), and the Big East is hardly a laughing stock.

And the process wasn’t cheap.

If Pitt thought that it was going to spend its future in Conference USA – one of our possible destinations if the Big East fails – it wouldn’t have dropped $100 million on the Petersen Events Center, or signed a long-term lease with Heinz field. If UConn didn’t have a conference to join this year, it wouldn’t have invested $90 million in a new football stadium. They did it because they thought they were building for years to come.

Perhaps most disturbing, however, is not Miami’s willingness to forsake the Big East’s charge to excellence and all the effort of the last decade, but the fact that Boston College has been invited to go with them. With all due respect to Boston College, their NIT-level basketball program and mediocre football team add nothing to the ACC, making dubious to the conference’s claim that it only seeks to raise its standards.

No, Boston College can offer one thing to the ACC: market. People will tune in and watch BC, no matter how bad the team is. The city is big, the alumni are devoted: there’s money to be made. Forget the fact that the ACC’s northernmost team is Maryland or that both Pitt and UConn are better in both major sports; there are TV contracts to be signed.

If Miami and Boston College leave, it could signal more than the end of the Big East. It could be a harbinger of an age where everything that used to matter in conference formation no longer does. Loyalty and prestige – the reasons Howland, Pederson and Boehm left – are irrelevant, as are geography and the quality of athletics. Only one thing matters and that’s money. Specifically, how much TV stations are willing to pay for coverage of individual teams.

Is it really so hard to imagine a day when the major conferences’ names are changed to reflect the dominating influences of the times? Ten years down the road, the names ACC, Big 12 and PAC-10 may be distant memories, and then colleges can backstab each other for the right to play in conferences ABC, NBC and CBS.