TCU To Join Big East. Trouble Ahead For PC?

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Scott Cordischi, GoLocalProv Sports Editor

When will it end? Maybe never.

Another shift was made in the game of musical chairs amongst major conferences. The latest domino to fall? TCU. The Horned Frogs agreed to join the Big East Conference in all sports starting in 2012-2013. A square peg in a round hole? Maybe. But this was another move clearly dictated by football.

Texas Christian University no more belongs in the Big East than Boston College does in the ACC. But this is the world we now live in. The world of big-time college athletics. There’s lots of money to be made and each conference and individual school is trying to figure out how they can maximize their revenue.

This latest move should send off another alarm on Smith Hill. This was all about football and that’s a sport which isn’t played at Providence College.

In the short term, the question is: how do you manage a 17-team conference? For the sport of men’s basketball, the answer is that you will play each of the other 16 teams once each season while playing two teams twice in a home and home format.

It’s the long term implications that should worry Friars Athletic Director Bob Driscoll and the folks at PC. With football being the tail that now wags the dog, how much longer before the football playing schools in the conference say, “enough is enough!”?

When does a Syracuse or Pittsburgh look at Providence College and Seton Hall and ask the question, “what do those schools really do for us?” Unfortunately, the answer is not much.

It’s not as if Rhode Island is this major market or fertile recruiting bed for college athletics. And Rutgers gives the Big East all of the New Jersey presence it needs.

It would be much harder for the league’s football schools to say goodbye to the likes of Georgetown and its nationally ranked men’s basketball program. The Hoyas give the league a much needed presence in Washington DC.

It’s been written here before that, in a perfect world, there would be a powerful all-sports conference here in the northeast which consists of Penn State, Boston College, UConn, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Syracuse and now Villanova which will make the jump to 1-A in football. Unfortunately, that horse left the barn a long time ago.

And with every other horse that either leaves the barn or, in the case of TCU, joins the stable, Friar fans have to wonder about the future of their existence in the Big East and exactly where they will fit in this ever-changing college sports landscape.