Formeer NFL Commissioner to Consult Big East

April 21, 2010
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Paul Tagliabue, the Commissioner of the NFL from 1989 until 2006, will serve as a Special Advisor to the BIG EAST Conference to provide strategic advice on future television arrangements and other priority matters, BIG EAST Commissioner John Marinatto announced. Tagliabue, who currently chairs the Board of Directors of BIG EAST member Georgetown University, will serve the BIG EAST on a volunteer basis.

“Few individuals have had as broad and deep experiences in sports as Paul Tagliabue,” stated Commissioner Marinatto. “Paul’s understanding of collegiate athletics and academics and his extensive experience and leadership of the NFL for 17 years will certainly be invaluable to the BIG EAST Conference and its 16 member institutions.”

The BIG EAST’s strategic planning will assess the Conference’s collective strengths and opportunities, as well as the evolving landscape of broadcast television, cable and other subscriber-supported networks – national, regional or conference-based -- and other new media opportunities.

Tagliabue served with distinction as NFL Commissioner and presided over an extended period of labor peace, industry-leading television and new media arrangements, league expansion and revenue growth in professional football. For his leadership in sports, Tagliabue has been recognized by the NCAA and the American Football Coaches Association as well as by many youth football and sports organizations. Before becoming the NFL’s CEO, Tagliabue served as counsel to the NFL, professional soccer and tennis, and other clients for two decades, and he recently chaired an independent committee that reported on the governance of the United States Olympic Committee.

Tagliabue is a 1962 graduate of Georgetown. He was a standout basketball player for the Hoyas and served as the team’s captain during his senior season.

For the BIG EAST, the upcoming 2010-2011 academic year will be the fourth of six-year television agreements with ESPN and CBS Sports and the fourth of a six-year agreement with marketing rights holder ISP Sports. These agreements were signed just one year after the league reconfigured and expanded its membership to 16 teams.

“When we expanded our membership to 16 schools in 2005-06, it also enhanced our media markets to represent approximately 25 percent of the country, thereby creating the groundwork for significant long-term revenue growth and security for our membership,” added Marinatto. “Now going into our sixth year under this configuration, we will strategically re-evaluate ways to build upon that foundation.”

Since the reconfiguration, the BIG EAST Conference has had unparalleled success in the sports of football and men’s and women’s basketball.

Football:

The BIG EAST Conference has a 154-59 (.723) record since 2005 - its best five-year stretch against nonconference opponents in league history. The BIG EAST Conference has a 16-6 (.737) record in postseason bowl games since 2006.

The BIG EAST had 27 players chosen in the 2009 NFL Draft. This was the highest per team average of any conference in the country. All eight teams in the conference had at least one player chosen in the first four rounds of the draft.

Men’s Basketball:

The BIG EAST Conference has earned 37 NCAA men’s championship bids in the last five years – almost 20 percent more than any other conference in the country.

Four different BIG EAST Conference member schools have reached the NCAA Final Four since 2005.

Women’s Basketball:

The BIG EAST Conference has had an average of 12 member schools participate in postseason play since 2006 – more than any other conference.

The BIG EAST Conference has earned 37 NCAA women’s championship bids since 2005 – more than any other conference in the country. In this timeframe, five BIG EAST Conference teams have advanced to the NCAA Final Four with two winning the national championship. In addition, two teams have earned WNIT Championships.

Big East is thinking bigger

With all the talk of expansion, the chatter around the Bowl Championship Series meetings here has the Big East under siege again, with schools such as Rutgers, Pittsburgh, and Syracuse possible targets of the Big Ten.

But the Big East made a proactive move, hiring former National Football League commissioner Paul Tagliabue as a consultant, to help it not only survive, but thrive.

“The idea was to think outside the box,’’ said Big East commissioner John Marinatto. “Look at different ways of doing things. Try and see what possibilities are out there. I don’t know what that is. It could be anything.’’

Marinatto said Tagliabue would start work immediately, and all areas of operation would be discussed, including expansion. When asked if he could envision the Big East — which already seems maxed out at 16 teams in basketball — actually getting bigger, he said, “Anything is possible.’’

Marinatto has talked to Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany ever since he took over for Mike Tranghese as Big East commissioner last summer. He has sought Delany’s counsel even though the Big Ten very well could target several Big East schools in its own expansion discussions.

“Brilliant,’’ said Marinatto about Delany yesterday during a break in the meetings. “I learn so much talking to him, listening to him. He’s schooling me in the way I need to think in this business.’’

One of the things Marinatto has picked up is to have a sense of purpose, especially for a first-year commissioner.

“The idea,’’ said Marinatto, “is to think strategically about the future.’’

Yesterday, Delany said no decisions had been made on any Big Ten expansion, and no announcement would be forthcoming any time soon.

One thing that appears more likely is that Notre Dame, which has been the center of most expansion speculation, will remain a football independent and a member of the Big East in basketball and other non-revenue producing sports.

But there could be some other action. There has been speculation that the Big East is going after Maryland, and there has even been talk that it could send out an olive branch to see if Boston College would come back. Throw in Central Florida as a partner in that state with South Florida, add that to a core Northeast group centered around Rutgers, Pitt, Syracuse, Connecticut, and West Virginia, and you might have something.

Any inclusion of Atlantic Coast Conference schools probably would happen only if a league such as the Southeastern Conference dipped in. If the ACC lost schools such as Clemson, Georgia Tech, Florida State, or Miami, Maryland and BC might be more inclined to look for safe haven in the Northeast.

Yesterday, SEC commissioner Mike Slive said his league would be proactive.

Critics suggest that the Big East is too big as a basketball league at 16 teams. What about 20?

“Who is to say we couldn’t go to 20 teams in basketball, but not have one 20-team league, but a league with pods of four or five teams?’’ said Marinatto. “You have to think strategic alliances — what strategic alliances could we create?

“Why couldn’t we do something with Notre Dame in football, where they aren’t a member but they schedule groups of teams in our conference [which is already being done]? Why couldn’t we do more with television, and have a Big East television network [similar to the Big Ten’s highly successful operation]?

“We need a new way of thinking. Strategic thinking. We need to be proactive rather than reactive, and develop our assets. Paul’s theory is, ‘Think long-term, think over the horizon.’ ‘Out-of-the-box thinking,’ Jim is always saying to me, ‘You have to think differently.’

“So hopefully Paul is going to help us think differently.’’

Marinatto said that making Big East football stronger is a priority.

“We do need to do that, because we have the Eastern footprint of the country,’’ he said. “But we also need quality.’’

Whether Maryland and BC can be pried way from the ACC is iffy. The Big East also would love to have Penn State back, in an ideal world.

For the Big East, the hiring of Tagliabue was the first move.

“The first of many steps over the next several months that we need to make,’’ said Marinatto, who may have fired the first shot in a long and dramatic change in the structure of college athletics.

Tagliabue Has Stern Words for Big Ten

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – The former N.F.L. commissioner Paul Tagliabue will be working with the Big East as an unpaid consultant to help the league maximize its value when it renegotiates its next television contracts.

Tagliabue has engaged with Big East Commissioner John Marinatto on a number of topics, from hiring consultants in different areas to anticipating and capitalizing on new media trends.

Tagliabue, who played basketball at Georgetown, admits that he is a bit of a novice when it comes to the nuances of college sports. But he had some stern words for how the Big Ten is handling its potential expansion.

“It’s very disruptive to everyone outside of the Big Ten,” Tagliabue said in a phone interview on Thursday. “Everything outside the Big Ten is held in artificial suspension. The Big Ten looks at a bunch of choices and everyone else has to deal with the depreciating value and a ton of negativity. I hope there’s a better way. Otherwise it’s going to have a terrible negative effect on everyone other than the schools in the Big Ten.”

Tagliabue said he wondered both from a practical and financial standpoint if the Big Ten expansion would be worth it.

“At some point they’re going to overreach and get a big negative reaction out of Congress or someone else,” he said. “You have to eventually tie your television to people actually watching and not just to television subscribers added up and totaled.”

Tagliabue wondered if the Big Ten expanding to the New York area by adding Syracuse and Rutgers would really make a difference. While the plan with the Big Ten Network has seemingly been to add the most populated areas, such as New Jersey with Rutgers or St. Louis with Missouri, Tagliabue disagreed with that strategy.

“One of the real challenges for the networks is to provide value, but you only provide value in markets where you provide traction,” he said. “Is Minnesota and Rutgers going to get a big rating on Long Island? Give me a break. Every game isn’t Michigan and Michigan State.”

He added, “Am I going to rush home from a tennis game on Saturday to watch Minnesota and Rutgers if I live on Long Island?”

As for what he would do for the Big East, Tagliabue stressed the league needed to anticipate media trends to stay ahead of the curve in order to maximize revenue.

“I think they really needed to step up from the specifics of the current situation and look at the big-picture on a long-term basis,” Tagliabue said. “It’s something I spent about 40 years doing, 20 as lawyer and 20 as commissioner.”

nice move big east

Big Ten’s next move will shake things up

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The overseers of college athletics — the conference commissioners — concluded their Bowl Championship Series meetings here yesterday, having looked to the future in the long term rather than year to year.

“I think for a while they administered it as if it wasn’t going to last,’’ said BCS executive director Bill Hancock. “But now we’re planning that it’s going to be here in the year 2040.’’

The tougher part for the commissioners will be to go back to their conferences and map strategic plans for a future that may include expansion for some and implosion for others.

Although there were no definitive announcements made at the meetings, plans are being formulated. One potential change would be to give the Mountain West champion the seventh automatic BCS bid in 2012 and 2013 (Big Ten, Big East, Atlantic Coast, Pac-10, Big 12, and Southeastern already receive automatic bids).

But the Big Ten is the linchpin for most of the movement.

On Wednesday, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany tried to put the toothpaste back in the tube in terms of how fast expansion would move. Delany said his conference was still in its 12-to-18-month format, which means nothing official until December.

Don’t bet on it.

In the next several weeks, the Big Ten will decide which plan it wants — and most guesses still have it as a five-school expansion to 16 teams. Once that is decided, the college presidents will examine potential additions to see if they fit — academically, athletically, even culturally.

The conferences in question and the schools of interest will be notified. The schools will then decide whether they are interested.

The Big East, Big 12, and ACC are the conferences most likely to be affected by this corporate raiding. Rutgers, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh in the Big East and Missouri and Nebraska in the Big 12 appear to be prime targets.

Whether the Big East, which has added former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue as a consultant, can come up with a counter plan remains to be seen.

Big East commissioner John Marinatto said it will be aggressive in its quest to preserve the conference’s football identity.

The SEC has taken the same stance.

“I won’t sit back and ignore what is going on around me,’’ said SEC commissioner Mike Slive. “We know who we are. They [the other conferences] want to look and see who they are.’’

The SEC, which owns the last four national football championships, knows who it is and what it is doing, and if the Big Ten acts, count on the SEC to move aggressively to counter, with ACC teams such as Clemson, Georgia Tech, Miami, and Florida State the most likely targets.

Elsewhere, doing less might be enough. Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott said his conference is still exploring expansion but he also said it might instead remain at 10 teams and promote legislation that would allow conferences with 10 teams to hold a championship game.

Downsizing may be a trend, with the NCAA deciding to limit the much-talked-about expansion of the basketball tournament to 68 teams (for one year at least) rather than 96.

That decision was greeted with enthusiasm by ACC commissioner John Swofford.

“I think that’s great, fantastic,’’ said Swofford, whose conference has claimed the last two basketball titles (Duke and North Carolina). “Sanity has prevailed. It’s just great news, and adding Turner to the television mix is good, because it gives a new face to the tournament.’’

Whether the major college conferences will have a new face in the coming months is the hot-button topic.

Slive, who along with Delany are the major players among the commissioners, with the most juice and the most influence, concedes the landscape might indeed change.

“What’s this all going to look like in five years?’’ he said. “I don’t know. It will probably be different.

“Will it be better? I guess that depends on your perspective.’’

Football, Not Basketball, Could Determine the Future of the Big East

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The commissioners and athletic directors from the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences departed Friday, leaving more questions than answers

Little of significance will happen with the prospective conference realignment until the Big Ten decides whether to expand, something that Commissioner Jim Delany stressed would not happen until at least December.

Depending on what the Big Ten decides, college sports could remain with the status quo or begin an evolution that could end with four 16-team superconferences.

One certainty was reaffirmed, though. Every major decision will be based on two factors: money and football. That has become clear in the uncertainty surrounding the Big East, which could lose multiple teams to the Big Ten largely because the conference television payout is projected to be nearly triple the Big East’s $7 million for football programs.

“Our industry is driven by football,” said Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick, whose university plays basketball in the Big East but is a football independent. “We probably had no more dramatic example of that than the A.C.C. expansion. It was really focused on growing football in that conference.”

The Big East was founded on basketball, and its current 16-team conglomeration is considered by many to be the premier basketball conference in the country. While its football has been solid, the eight-member league lacks the national cachet of its basketball league. But in terms of television dollars and the future of its teams, that cachet matters little.

If universities like Syracuse, Rutgers or Pittsburgh jump to the Big Ten as speculated, basketball will hardly be a significant consideration, even though basketball rivalries like Syracuse-Georgetown have resonated for a generation compared with football rivalries like Cincinnati-West Virginia.

The ESPN senior vice president Burke Magnus said that in terms of television viewership, there was a huge disparity between even the most meaningful regular-season college basketball game and a Saturday afternoon football game.

Magnus said football had “definitely become the driver.”

That disappoints someone like Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim, a Big East loyalist who began coaching the Orange before the Big East formed in 1979.

“Boston College is in the A.C.C., and no one cares about it there,” Boeheim said of the former Big East program that joined the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2005. “They have hung on in football, but Miami and Florida State will get strong again and they’ll be an afterthought in football.

“I don’t think we’ll do well in the Big Ten. It’s possible, but I don’t think we’d do well at all. I just don’t see how Syracuse or Rutgers fits in with Iowa and Illinois.”

Boeheim said that players in recruiting hotbeds like New York, Philadelphia and Washington, the lifeblood markets for Big East universities, probably would not find playing in a Midwest-dominated league appealing.

“Say a couple schools go to the Big Ten,” Boeheim said. “Who’s to say a New York City kid would want to go there? There’s no logical reason for that kid to want to do that. But someone with a big ego in a football conference is taking over. I just don’t think it helps recruiting to be in the Big Ten.”

Big East Commissioner John Marinatto acknowledged that the Big East had “essentially become a football conference in a lot of ways.”

The conference was created in 1979 to link the powerful East Coast media markets for basketball with colleges like Villanova, Georgetown and St. John’s, and Marinatto said that essentially “everything we’ve done in expansion and moving forward has been because of football.”

As for the doomsday scenario of the demise of the Big East, delivered last week by the former Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel, there has not been much hand-wringing from the Big East’s nonfootball-playing universities over the future. Surely, the coaches and administrators are curious how everything will play out. But there is a confidence among the nonfootball colleges that they will stay together, probably in an all-Catholic league.

“I’ll be honest with you,” the new Seton Hall basketball coach, Kevin Willard, said. “You look at the nonfootball schools in the league, and they’re some of the greatest basketball traditions that you have. You look at the core of what makes the Big East, it’s the nonfootball schools.”

Marquette Coach Buzz Williams said that no one had asked about the future of the league while he was recruiting this spring.

“It’s so difficult to predict what anyone is going to do,” Williams said of the future of conference realignment. “Everything is somewhat predicated on, if this scenario happens, this is what our plan would be.”

Providence Athletic Director Bob Driscoll said he was optimistic about the Big East, and did not put any credence to the Chicken Little possibilities.

“I don’t share the gloom and doom that perhaps some of the other folks share,” he said. “I was in the league when we went through the last iteration, and I believe that the league is much stronger, both in football and basketball.

“Change is inevitable, and if and when it comes, I think we’ll be in position to continue to make the league even stronger.”

Chances are, whatever we are thinking is going to happen with the Big 10 will probably be just the opposite. I think if you follow the money trail, the teams who are more than likely to make the Big 10 the most television network money are UCONN and Boston College. With their style of football, BC already seems more like a a Big 10 school than an ACC school. And the Big 10 would be snatching up a big market in Boston. With UCONN the Big 10 would be snatching up a totally new TV market along with adding a couple basketball powers to their conference. Along with another rugged Big 10 style football team that will probably start up some new rivalries. Despite what I'm hearing about Syracuse, I also heard that they are just the 79th rated TV market. So I doubt that they would be the direction the Big 10 would go. The Big 10 already has a good portion of Pittsburgh watching their games, so I'm not sure what the big gain will be there. Rutgers is a possibilty along with Cincy. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Big 10 bypasses the the Big East for another conference. I think BC would be a much easier team for the 12 team ACC to replace than anybody from the 8 team Big East.