Five years ago, tensions were boiling between football and non-football members in a once-proud basketball conference.
“The last several years prior to the basketball schools breaking away, we had a lot of tension in our conference meetings,” BIG EAST associate commissioner John Paquette said. “And the tension was clear.”
Fed up with football-centric decisions tarnishing the conference’s superb basketball reputation, the seven Catholic non-football members, dubbed the “Catholic Seven,” split with the rest of their former conference and formed the new BIG EAST.
As the conference enters its fifth season of play in 2017-’18, similar tactics to what put the BIG EAST on the map originally are leading its resurgence into the college basketball landscape.