By Dave Cooperman

There was a lot of good stuff in Trish LaMonte’s piece in the Post Standard, essentially questioning whether or not the Big East would be best served for the future by creating their own network.  It seems like an obvious decision given the success of the Big Ten Network, but could the Big East deliver a similar product?

For starters the Big Ten Network is built on the back of their 11 football programs.  If the Big East were to go down that road, the network would essentially survive based on their 16 basketball schools, and football would merely be their for added consumption.  The Big Ten boasts national football programs in Ohio St., Michigan and Penn St, while the Big East can say the same in hoops with Villanova, UConn, Syracuse and Georgetown routinely finding themselves in nationally televised games.

A major advantage for the Big East would be their footprint in medium to large media markets.  As the league is currently comprised there is representation in New York, Philly, Washington D.C., Tampa, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Chicago and Milwaukee.  You can easily question just how large of a footprint they have in each of those, but the larger point is the number of television sets the network could theoretically get to.  As the Big Ten prepares to expand into a more diverse set of markets, the Big East was shockingly ahead of the curve.  A number of the aforementioned markets were thanks to the recent additions.

While the basketball piece would be attractive for a network, the football side will likely be driving the bus, and in order to do so the league has to get stronger in that department.  The potential of their own network could be the carrot that attracts the horse.  Prior to the Big Ten hitting a gold mine in the form of 22 million dollar annual payout they didn’t exactly have teams beating down their doors to get in.  It can’t just be more teams; they have to be recognizable programs.  The Orlando Sentinel wrote this morning of whispers that the league was interested in Central Florida.  That’s the wrong answer for the Big East as a standalone program.

The right answers for the league are Boston College and Maryland.  Calling them up today and offering our measly football conference and revenue deal would likely be met with laughter if not with an immediate click.  The question is could either school be persuaded by the possibility of their own network and an unbelievable basketball conference?  Both are better geographic fits in the Big East, and BC could deliver the Boston market, while Maryland strengthens the DC/Baltimore region.  After those two then go ahead and offer Central Florida, which sits nicely in Orlando and Memphis, which could give you a piece of the Tennessee market.  Now you got a 12 team conference with some juice and a championship game, sitting in real markets that stretch from the Midwest through the East Coast down into Florida.

You got to be excited by the prospects of that football conference, all started by the creation of your own network.  So now you might be thinking that football is great, but the basketball conference is now bloated to 20 teams.  It isn’t ideal, but what else is their to do?  When the Big East decided to grab Marquette and DePaul they essentially left minimal wiggle room to expand football without expanding basketball.  File this under the price you have to pay.

So to conclude, the potential for an incredible network is there but it feels like it hinges on the strength of football.  Even if a network isn’t in the cards then the conference can at least bring some leverage to ESPN that puts them on a level playing field with the other BCS conferences.  In order to avoid defections in the near term, they need to get ultra aggressive and see if they could entice BC and Maryland to the table.  If they can, then this whole game of expansion could change.  The only thing that rests on this is the future of the league.