From near-death resurrection as a basketball-focused league in … – Sports Business Journal

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There’s a slim, white binder that resides in Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman’s Manhattan office that’s a bit more beat up than the rest.
There’s no label on the binder’s front. A sticker along its spine that reads “Big East Key Agreements” is the only real identifying marker of what’s inside. Ackerman, who jokes she’s lost count of how many times she’s thumbed through the pages, was handed it on her first day as Big East commissioner in 2013.
It was, in theory, the playbook for bringing the league back from the precipice of extinction.

“[The idea] was in place,” Ackerman said. “It was just a matter of bringing it to life.”
What followed was the chaotic years-long effort of digging the Big East Conference out from the ashes of its original iteration, building it back from the ground floor — without football — and reshaping the league with a unique basketball-focused identity.
“This was, I think, the first time that I really felt the urgency and the full weight of that leadership chair,” Ackerman said. “And I was really ready for it.”
Now 10 years and three men’s basketball national titles since the Big East almost ceased to exist, the league is thriving amid the chaos brought on by football-driven conference realignment.
How?
“The Big East was born a basketball conference,” former Georgetown men’s basketball coach John Thompson III said. “That’s who the founding members were. That’s who we are. Let’s not try to let the tail wag the dog as it relates to football. We don’t have it. Let’s stand on who we are. That’s how the ‘New Big East’ was formed.”

Marquette and Xavier tip off the Big East tournament championship game in March at Madison Square Garden, at the center of the league’s basketball-only focus.getty images

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Former Villanova men’s basketball coach Jay Wright sighs deeply. He’s an optimist by nature. It’s part of what endears him to college basketball fans as a commentator for CBS.
But the thought of the 2013 Big East spring meetings flips Wright’s usually sunny disposition.
“It just seemed like the world was coming to an end,” he said.
In a league steeped in quirky traditions, spring meetings were a microcosm of the familial sentiment among its coaches and administrators. The Big East held the annual gathering in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., for decades. It’s where coaching icons Jim Calhoun, Lou Carnesecca and P.J. Carlesimo broke bread and litigated key issues.
“It still had that old Italian influence where they’d all get together to yell at each other, but by the end, they were hugging,” joked Wright, who first joined the Villanova staff in the late 1980s.
With the league in the midst of splitting its football and basketball-playing counterparts, those basketball-focused members’ futures had become increasingly murky. For the first time in years, spring meetings were also moved from Ponte Vedra Beach to a Ritz Carlton near Miami — a sign of the times.
“It was the most miserable [week],” Wright continued. “It poured rain every day. We didn’t get to golf. We didn’t get to go out to the beach. We came out of those meetings so depressed.”
To understand the splintering of the Big East takes rewinding. It was formed in 1979 as a basketball-focused enterprise. ESPN, then in its infancy, partnered with the league to help fill its aggressive programming goals.
The Big East took off as college basketball reigned supreme within — at least until football aspirations created a divide. The league officially began sponsoring football in 1991 following the additions of Miami, Rutgers, Temple, Virginia Tech and West Virginia.
Virginia Tech and Miami eventually chased football dollars, departing for the ACC in 2003. Boston College joined them in short order. Cincinnati, Louisville, South Florida, Marquette and DePaul were added to the Big East to mitigate the losses. Discussions of adding TCU, San Diego State, Houston and Boise State to keep the league afloat in the early 2010s followed as the growing divide between the football and basketball schools created a rift in the Big East’s fabric.
“I remember going to a meeting of presidents and ADs in New York City … you’re looking around the room and you’re seeing these people from different parts of the country and you’re thinking, ‘Man, this is the Big East? This doesn’t feel right,’” Georgetown Athletic Director Lee Reed said. “It didn’t feel right. … You had the gentleman from [Navy] that was in a military uniform. You had the president from one of the other schools that had cowboy boots. And you’re thinking to yourself, ‘How in the heck is this going to work?’”
The league’s deeply rooted divisions turned fatal amid negotiations for a new television contract in April 2011. Reports at the time indicated former Big East Commissioner John Marinatto, who died in 2021, recommended the Big East accept a nine-year deal from ESPN worth $1.17 billion — good for an average of $130 million annually. The problem, though, centered on non-football members netting just $2.43 million annually compared to the $13.8 million the football membership would receive. The league presidents voted the deal down.
ESPN carried an exclusive negotiating window into November 2012 that eventually came and went without a deal, sending the Big East onto the open market.
In the midst of the television negotiation chess, Notre Dame, Rutgers and West Virginia left the league. Longtime stalwarts Pittsburgh and Syracuse departed too, while Marinatto resigned as commissioner on May 7, 2012.
The remaining football members — Cincinnati, Louisville, Rutgers, South Florida, Temple and UConn — followed then-commissioner Mike Aresco to what became the AAC. (Louisville and Rutgers also eventually left the AAC for the ACC and Big Ten, respectively).
The basketball playing membership, dubbed the “Catholic 7” — DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova — were left to pick up the pieces.
“We just said, ‘Look, we’re going to split, we’re going to figure out how to add a few more schools to the portfolio here,’” recounted former Villanova AD Vince Nicastro, “and then we’re going to go out and see what the market can bear.”

Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman with the conference’s head men’s basketball coaches at Madison Square Garden on media day last week.Courtesy of the Big East

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Time tends to cure past ills. But consider those television negotiations with ESPN a sore spot, even a decade later.
“Don’t get me going,” Georgetown President Jack Degioia said through a laugh. “I won’t be polite.”
If the Catholic 7 were to reorganize, Degioia and his compatriots felt there were six required steps:
 Break off from the football-playing members of the Big East.
 Keep the “Big East” name.
 Add three new members to bring the league to an even 10 teams.
 Maintain Madison Square Garden for the conference tournament.
 Nab a media rights deal.
 Recruit a commissioner.
The first four steps came in short order. The basketball and football-playing members of the Big East came to an agreement in December 2012 to officially split in July the following year, with Aresco overseeing the football schools. As part of the agreement, the basketball schools would maintain the Big East name and keep Madison Square Garden as the anchor site for their conference tournament.
Butler, Creighton and Xavier (Ohio) were then added to the new Big East in March 2013, bringing membership to 10 and further expanding the league’s footprint into the Midwest.
“We felt they had great leadership,” said Joel Fisher, the executive vice president of marquee events and operations for MSG Entertainment. “People want to come and see games at Madison Square Garden. [The Big East] wanted to retain the name, and the Garden was a big part of the deal. We felt there was a really good chance for a positive future.”
Where relations turned sour between ESPN and the Big East, Fox Sports filled a void.
Fox Sports Executive Vice President Larry Jones was first approached about a potential deal with the league during a visit to New York City. He sat down with St. John’s Rev. Donald J. Harrington and discussed early-stage details of what a deal could look like if the seven Catholic schools split off. DeGioia and Providence’s Rev. Brian Shanley were also quickly cued in.
“[The law firm] Proskauer was leading the charge,” Jones said. “The deal was negotiated, if I remember correctly, they had the three [new] schools or were about to have the three new schools, and it had flexibility if the Big East was going to add a school.”
The collapse of the ESPN negotiations notwithstanding, the fit between league and network made sense. Fox Sports was in the process of launching Fox Sports 1 and, like ESPN in the late 1970s, it needed programming for the undertaking.
Enter the Big East.
“There was kind of a symmetry to what we did with Fox Sports with how we engaged with ESPN in the earliest days of both of our launches,” DeGioia said.
Added Nicastro: “It was providential, so to speak, that Fox was about to launch FS1.”
The Big East and Fox Sports agreed to a 12-year deal worth $500 million in March 2013. As part of the deal, the league’s “Big Monday” showcase was sustained. That had a tangible impact — beyond dollars and cents — in itself.  Wright lauded how crucial playing on national TV was for Villanova’s renaissance. Creighton’s Greg McDermott noted it gave the school exposure it didn’t have previously.
“The stars aligned, and we really needed each other at that point,” McDermott said. “Because they needed content and we needed a TV partner. It’s all worked out great and the relationships that we’ve developed and continue to have with the folks at Fox Sports have been really incredible.”
With the media rights deal wrapped and the new Big East building out its membership, one checklist item remained: Find a commissioner.

A new deal with Fox helped the Big East rebuild itself after its football-playing schools decided to bolt for other conferences to chase bigger paydays.getty images

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Ackerman didn’t necessarily have fixations on running another league. She’d done that in her past life as the first president of the WNBA and her years working in the NBA league office alongside David Stern.
Amid the Big East’s breakup, Ackerman was teaching a sports leadership class at Columbia University with co-professor Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS Sports.
The pair liked to lean on real-world examples and case studies in their teaching. The Big East was that. The league’s unraveling and the pivot to a basketball focus in a football-centric ecosystem all provided context for their students. 
“Here we were in the spring of 2013 engaging with our students about how this league was falling apart,” Ackerman said. “The ‘Catholic 7’ [was] making noise about coming back together as a new league with the addition of three new schools and a TV deal with Fox and [we were] musing about how they’re playing with their prospects.”
Pilson was consulting with the league at the time and eventually passed Ackerman’s name along to the search firm Russell Reynolds, which was tasked with vetting commissioner candidates.
Ackerman noted she was first contacted about the role in April 2013. She would begin as commissioner three months later.
“She couldn’t even get to the business of ‘How do we make this work strategically? How do we craft other arrangements and partnerships to make sure that our schools are getting what they need in terms of service and in revenues’ [at the start]?” Nicastro said. “She was trying to find office space.”
To call Ackerman’s undertaking herculean is almost underselling it. Forget membership, conference tournaments or coaches. The league didn’t even have its own internet domain, email infrastructure or bank account when Ackerman came on.
“I was on my Gmail account for months,” Ackerman said. “We had no website. We had no checking account — Georgetown was managing our finances until I hired a CFO and we got [JP Morgan Chase] to give us a checking account. We had no benefits plan, so everybody I was hiring, I was promising benefits to.”
Law firm Proskauer gave Ackerman space in their New York offices to work, first in an associate’s office before she was upgraded to a partner’s digs a few months in. Joe D’Antonio, who’d been with the previous iteration of the Big East since 2005, was brought on as the de facto first employee when Ackerman hired him as a senior associate commissioner.
Visiting his ailing grandfather in Orlando, Fla., shortly after his hiring, D’Antonio needed to alert the athletic directors to a pressing matter. So there in a hospital room, he fired off the first email in the league’s new history.
“Val and I have talked about this a lot,” said D’Antonio, now the commissioner of the Coastal Athletic Association. “It’s a very, very rare opportunity that you literally get a chance to be involved in something like this literally at the ground level. Like, you are building it from nothing.”
■ ■ ■ ■
Inside the offices at Proskauer, a plaque commemorating the start of the new Big East resides there as a reminder of the nature of the league’s rebirth. It reads, “Home of the Big East Conference from July 2013 to September 2014.”
The plaque was a gift from Ackerman, a reference to her stark realities in the earliest stages of the league’s formation.

“The league that I took over,” Ackerman said, “was a startup.”
Proof of concept came quickly for the Big East after its relaunch in 2013. Creighton, Providence, Villanova and Xavier all qualified for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament their first year of competition. Wright and the Wildcats won their first of two national titles two years later.
UConn, which came back into the league for all sports except football in 2020, won the Big East’s third men’s basketball title in eight years last March.
“We got four teams into the men’s basketball tournament [in 2013], and that was validation,” Ackerman said. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is now coming to be — this vision that the presidents of the schools at that time had, that the league could go back to its roots and be successful as a basketball league in a football world.’”
What comes next for the Big East remains to be seen.
The college sports landscape has been dramatically altered, in large part due to the growing price tag of media rights deals. The Pac-12 may well cease to exist after its disastrous media rights negotiations ended with the overnight implosion of the league in August. The ACC has its membership presumably locked in for the next decade-plus thanks to the grant of rights its schools amended in 2016.
The SEC and Big Ten were the biggest winners of the growing media rights bubble. The SEC’s deal with ESPN that begins in 2024 is worth around an average of $710 million annually. The Big Ten, meanwhile, finalized media rights deals with CBS, Fox and NBC that will pay it more than $8 billion through 2030.
Even the AAC has a 12-year deal in place with ESPN that runs through 2031 and is worth just shy of $1 billion ($83.3 million annually).
How that all affects a basketball-centric league like the Big East is to be determined. The Big East’s television deal with Fox is slated to run through 2025. The expectation from both sides is there will be a renewal sooner than later. The league is also in the midst of a multiyear agreement with MSG to keep its conference tournament there.
“I think that they still have a lot of those folks that are committed to doing the right things,” said former Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe, who consulted on the Big East’s reformation in 2013. “It’s a challenging environment, obviously. For them to hold together is great, because football is driving the bus, as we all know.”
“I like where the Big East is positioned,” Jones added. “Because they’re out of the football fray and they have a brand.”
Basketball aspirations brought the Big East back from the dead. Growing revenue from football media rights aside, expect the Big East’s now-defunct football product to remain buried 6 feet under.
“I got asked the other day by someone if I thought the Big East would ever go back and sponsor football again,” Ackerman said. “And I said, not with the group I have. I can’t see them — especially the ones that were here 10 years ago — wanting to relive what was unfolding for the Big East during that stretch. … It was just an absolute circus.”
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