Early this morning, news broke that the ACC had voted to accept Louisville into the conference – leaving UConn standing as the game of realignment musical chairs seemingly comes to an end.
The ACC appeared to be UConn’s last legitimate chance to continue their basketball legacy and advance their football program. By losing out to Louisville, UConn is left in a dying conference with little light at the end of the tunnel.
The bastardization and subsequent demise of the Big East is depressing. Once the greatest basketball conference in the world is now losing its last four league champions (Louisville, Pittsburgh and Syracuse twice). Already weakened on the football side by the departure of West Virginia and the 2003 exodus of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College, commissioner Mike Aresco has spanned the country desperately pulling in geographical anomalies like Boise St., Tulane and East Carolina. San Diego St. joining the Big “East” conference marking the most ridiculous of the additions. It’s sad, but UConn needed to leave.
Losing out to Louisville is, to put it bluntly, a failure. By all measures, UConn had the better case. They controlled a larger media market. They had the basketball legacy that fit with the makeup of the ACC. Their academics were miles ahead of their hillbilly conference-mates to the south. In the end, it appears to have come down to two things: lobbying and football.
In his last, great failure as Athletics Director, Jeff Hathaway hired former Syracuse football coach Paul Pasqualoni. There was backlash at the time that Hathaway hadn’t run the hire past key boosters, namely Robert Burton – whose name now adorns UConn’s new football practice facility. Following the departure of Randy Edsall, UConn needed a big move to keep growing their blossoming football program. In the two years since Edsall’s departure, Hathaway has been replaced and Pasqualoni has failed to land a single significant recruit in leading the Huskies to a middling 10-13 record thus far. Louisville’s football program has not been demonstrably better than UConn’s in the last half decade, but UConn hasn’t shown that it has a plan for bettering their product and filling the beautiful new stadium in East Hartford that is sucking money from taxpayers and the university with every game it doesn’t sell out.
There is a lot of blame to go around and no one can be sure where it properly lies. Sources out of the ACC are saying the Louisville’s lobbying efforts were so tenacious and effective that the minds of the member schools were swayed. Does that mean UConn Athletics Director Warde Manuel and school President Susan Herbst did not lobby enough? Was the uncertainty born from Edsall’s cowardly departure and the ensuing missteps of the Pasqualoni experiment enough to convince the ACC that UConn football would never be competitively or economically viable? Did Jim Calhoun’s basketball program let academics slide so far that the NCAA sanctions leveled upon now-Kevin Ollie’s basketball team create instability and doubt in the university’s proudest asset?
The answer is undoubtedly some mix of all of the above – and, at present, completely irrelevant. The ACC was UConn’s best hope at escaping the disaster of NCAA realignment relatively unscathed, but some flicker of optimism remains. If Maryland wins the lawsuit absolving responsibility to pay the $50M exit fee demanded by the ACC, perhaps Florida St. follows them out the door and heads for the SEC. Maybe the Big 10 adds to their new additions of Maryland and Rutgers, finding a space for UConn and equally-screwed Cincinnati.
What is certain is that, if this was UConn’s final chance to jump ship to a stronger conference, they blew it. In the fractured, remnants of the Big East, UConn stands as a once-proud beacon of glory that will never come back.
this is terrible. what has our university been doing over the last couple days..
I imagine we’ll find out once the ACC members start talking a little more.
I’d just like to point out that I called it when Pasqualoni was hired that it’d be a monumentous mistake.