End of the Big East—Birth of an Old Fashioned Conference

Much like Argentina, no one should cry for the end of the Big East, and certainly no one should romanticize it. Villanova, Marquette, Georgetown, St. John's, Providence, Seton Hall and DePaul, all urban undergraduate focused non football schools, are leaving the conference. This spells the end of a long painful death spiral. (As usual Pete Thamel does a fine job examing the process) In 1980 the Big East was carved out as the first completely commercial conference. It was created solely to stake out a market, produce a brand across disparate schools and increase the probability of getting schools into the NCAA basketball tournament. Born in commerce, it dies in commerce. One side effect may be the creation of a new conference that actually resembles what conferences were once upon a time.

From 1980 to 2005 the Big East launched an unparalleled period of success and visibility for its schools in basketball. Traditional eastern powers like Villanova, Georgetown, Syracuse and Providence joined with newcomer powers like Connecticut and Pittsburgh to generate a depth of competition and market visibility. The Big East branded a distinct form of physical and tough basketball. Each year 6-8 teams got into the NCAA tournament, and their coaches spread the gospel of brutal Big East basketball across the land. The expansion of the NCAA tournament into a national liturgical event gained immense stature for its schools. Connecticut and Syracuse with their superstar coaches took home a series of titles

This basketball success could not withstand the pressures unleashed by the economic dominance of football over the last twenty years. College football and its vast popularity has reaped huge media money, and power conferences have reaped gigantic windfalls from conference contracts. These contracts at the five elite BCS conferences garner 15 to 19 million dollars a year for schools.

College football drives the profit. The Big East was never a football conference. Largely because no one else even looked plausible, the Big East snuck into the BCS championship pool as much as a sop to the mid major conferences as any football merit of the conference. Each year its BCS team got humiliated by real football powers in a random BCS bowl game. Heck, TCU quit the conference before it ever joined the conference.

A media consultant once told me, “aside from the tournament, basketball is filler for slots. It has bulk but not profits.”  The dominance of football and the migration of real money to the big five left the Big East vulnerable in two ways. First, it would never be a serious football conference. At random times Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, West Virginia or Cincinnati might emerge for a year a two with a great player or coach. But the coach would inevitably move on, and the player would graduate. When Boston College, Miami and especially Virginia Tech jumped to the ACC, this portended the end of any hope of football elite status. Second, all the Big East schools were hemorrhaging money with football, and the inability of the conference to ever gain elite football status doomed them to perpetual money losing.

This still-born football status coupled with huge monetary losses from football meant any half way decent football schools looked for other conferences that could gain them more money and status. It also meant that the basketball only schools found themselves mooted by the desperate and futile search for football credibility. This lead to increasingly desperate overtures to Boise State, San Diego State, Tulane or whomever could bring a shred of credibility to the conference.

In addition unlike the ACC or Big 10, the Big East never had any serious academic credibility. Schools such as Syracuse or Pittsburgh or Louisville would jump to the ACC which offered more money, stability and more academic stature. Each defection lead to more panicked search for lower quality football schools to fill the void. The Big East could no longer fulfill the requirements of a  successful modern conference.

The paradox here lies with the non-football schools. Most of them were city based religious colleges colleges. They all remained mission driven undergraduate institutions. None of them had huge endowments, but all had fierce and loyal alumni based in urban areas. Many had added strong professional schools and grown into universities, but their core identity remains mission driven undergraduate education. None of them had added football, and the very few who did like Boston College struggled with indifferences and periodic success.

These urban, mission driven religious undergraduate schools had great markets in big eastern cities and had strong traditional rivalries among New York, Providence, Boston, New Jersey or Philadelphia. Many of these rivalries echoed back fifty years when schools clustered in small boxes to play intense rivalries. They all shared plausible commitments to serious undergraduate education with a values based foundation. Sister schools like Xavier, St. Louis, Creighton lived in different conferences. They now loom along with an interesting and similar newcomer like Butler as possible new allies for a reconstituted conference who would share a scale and values dimension.

This basketball driven conference would not make huge amounts of money, granted. The new conference, however, would connect strong rivalries among strong markets with strong committed undergraduate focused universities and colleges. It would also lead to strong filled auditoriums. The conference would post strong strength of schedule and high RPI ratings for the tournament. Travel for the Olympic sports would be manageable. It would have a strong brand, solid recruiting base, good coaches and regularly get strong exposure at tournament time.

More interestingly the conference schools would not face the economic hemorrhaging of football. Football is a two-edge sword. The vast majority of football schools lose serous money, and the losses require internal subsidies. Even with the new mega conference contracts, schools continue to lose money as they must pay rising salaries, build up facilities and pay back internal subsidies to schools. Freeing themselves from the football schools permits these undergraduate focused universities to live within their means, still gain visibility through NCAA tournament runs and imbed themselves in their communities as they once did. It still gives alumni a focal point of identity.

The demise of the first purely commercial conference creates a paradox. Who knows, maybe a new conference might emerge that shares similar undergraduate based values, has relatively contiguous markets with traditional rivalries and does not lose huge amounts of money each year chasing the dream of football largesse. It would be a conference based upon affinity and proximity. Now wouldn’t that be a change?


Big East Exodus

School	Left	For
Miami	2004	ACC
Virginia Tech	2004	ACC
Boston College	2005	ACC
TCU †	2011	Big 12
West Virginia	2012	Big 12
Syracuse	2013	ACC
Pittsburgh	2013	ACC
Louisville	2014	ACC
Rutgers	2014	Big Ten
Notre Dame	2015	ACC
DePaul*	undetermined
Georgetown*	undetermined
Marquette*	undetermined
Providence*	undetermined
St. John's*	undetermined
Seton Hall*	undetermined
Villanova*	undetermined

Net Sports: The Logic of Volleyball & Tennis

The NCAA Volleyball championships ended this week with a dominant performance by the University of Texas team. Their women played a superb power game while displaying uncanny and tenacious digging defense as they cruised past Oregon. The tournament games represented the epitome of the logic of net games where a net separates the two teams or opponents as in tennis.

The separation created by the net creates a dynamic different than contact team sports because it prohibits opponents from physically impacting a player to throw that player off his or her execution. This insulation from physical impact whether a tackle, block, bump, grab or check that dominates football, soccer or modern basketball means that that no one can lay a body on you and knock you our of your rhythm or skill by sheer physical impact or violence. This displaces the role of intimidation and forces players and teams to rely more on intellectual strategic and tactical misdirection to throw players out of their games.

The separation from physical buffeting permits a premium focus upon skill and form without the need for massive muscular or mental ferocity to fight through the physical assault upon body and form in contact sports. This freedom from physical intimidation permits focus proficiency and minute gradations that are often impossible to sustain in execution in “contact” sports.

I cannot emphasize enough how net sports channel strength and skill development into pure form and coordination rather than the type of strength, aggression and ferocity needed to fight through contact sport. This is not football with its violent and planned collisions and it is not basketball or soccer with its “incidental” but endless contact (I won’t even talk about hockey with its legalized brawling). The open space of net sports permits players to execute in space and time free of the manhandling of contact. It also, like baseball, isolates a very fine-grained form of evident responsibility for one’s actions in coordination with others.

It also leads to a different mental mind-set. The physical structure of the court amplifies this. Unlike flow sports that move from one basket/goal/end zone to another and can expand the field of play, the field of play remains rigidly circumscribed. Players have nowhere to go with no movement away from their spot to the other end of the court of field. Each player has responsibility for the space they control and intricate moving relations, almost balletic, with each other once action starts. This circumscribed court emphasizes and rewards quickness and lightening pattern recognition and reaction time over pure speed that open fields or sprints to the other end of a two ended field requires. 

Players possess autonomy in their space. They are responsible for their side of the court as in tennis or their part of the court in volleyball. It requires players to play both offense and defense but in the same space with the same patterns rather than moving suddenly to the other end of the field to reposition. Although like football and other reset sports, it permits the player or team to reset after each point and prepare for the play rather than the pure flow sports such as soccer or lacrosse or water polo. This permits players and coaches to develop superb and unfettered skill sets because no one is physically disrupting their actions. It means plays and schemes exist with a relative clarity of purpose and execution. This enables a form of beauty that can exist almost unsullied such as the perfection of a serve or beauty of a return at full extension or a magnificent dig that requires immense physical courage and skill and body control all at the same time. The athlete’s body exists alone in space and time unimpeded by contact with other opponents.  Net sports isolate responsibility in a visible and inescapable manner since no one is disrupting them.

This capacity to execute plays without opponents contact puts a premium upon speed and precision and almost unconscious situational awareness of where teammates are. At the same time the attack/defense dynamic moves from one of pure strength and bullying through or towards the goal and relies upon reaction and throwing off the anticipated system and flow of the other team. Because the opponents cannot use physical strength or bullying, teams and players have to rely upon skill, tactical placement, disturbing rhythms and immense speed and precision in their response.

The placement of the ball dominates the movement and tactics. The serve, the return or in volleyball the serve reception that then gets the ball to the setter determine almost everything. The teams must move incredibly fast given the speed or placement of serves and adapt quickly and in a meticulous choreographed manner.

Offense and defense depend upon the mind and patterns recognition and incredible speed of reaction. This is true of all elite one on one competition, but the net court remains fixed and static. All this occurs in a defined area that cannot be expanded through movement up and down the court. This closure of the court intensifies the speed of reaction time and minimizes the time to see the pattern and react.

Sometimes players are strong enough to simply overpower the other side with blistering serves or power hits that move so fast they go over or through blocks. But more often, players must place the serve at a precise spot with differential speed or spin. The serve seeks to throw the receiver off their best return. In tennis a fine serve forces the returner to a weakened or misplaced return that in many ways determines the point that may not end until five hits later. Likewise in volleyball serve receive remains stunningly important. If the receiver cannot get it to the setter in the right place, the set will be off either in terms of space or position on the court. This throws off the entire scheme; again the point may be over even though it takes five or six hits to get there.

Placement, speed, deception, misdirection all matter in direct competition team sports but they reach their purest form in net sports because the opponent does not have the option of pushing or blocking or checking someone out of the way. Opponents must draw each other out of position with tactical insight and physical or psychological misdirection. The mind and skill must win, not just physical disruption.

Because of this structure the serve dominates net sports in unique ways almost equivalent to the importance of the pitch in baseball. The baroque techniques and rococo gyrations of table tennis serves highlight this domination and importance to incongruous extremes.

Because of the structure as both a net sport and a reset sport, the serve and serve reception overwhelm all other aspects of the sport. Serves are the one moment when the player is alone, unfettered and has complete control of their actions, much like the pitcher in baseball.

The primacy of the serve places immense emphasis upon developing complex, powerful and intriguing serves. Sheer speed is not enough. Elite defenders quickly master the speed serve. Players need accuracy and diversity. If a defender only has to master one serve reception, they can anticipate and pounce. Volleyball manifests this in unique ways because six separate players will serve, and each player can bring a unique skill, rhythm, and speed to the game. Raw power serves may be the most fun but can be the most predictable. On the other hand floaters that land in defender’s chest or exactly between two zones or a drop serve the slices into the back of a players hit can force maximum extension and deflate the serve return. This displaces the offense set up and can be far more devastating than a big booming serve. Of course the most fun lies in the ACE where a serve blows past or forces an error by the receiver and the player or team win the point without any return. Aces can be tactically demoralizing, bring in the spectators and win points without exertion of the rest of the team. They can tempt some players or teams to over rely upon them, but when they occur, can be beautiful.

No one interferes with the serve—it remains just you and the ball—that’s it. Along with pitching, serving represents one of the purest moments in all sports. It isolates the athlete, the athlete’s skill and the requirements of a situation. For instance the type of serve will change depending upon the serve reception skill of the opponent; it will change depending upon the rhythm or expectation built up at that point in the game; it will change depending upon one’s own capacity to hit aces; it changes depending upon how important the point is and how much pressure is upon both server and receiver; it changes depending upon the noise or excitement or stress emanating from the spectators and fans. Elite serving requires immense situational awareness, exceptional self-control and superb skill. Modern rally scoring amplifies this because missing a serve gives a point to the other side as well as returning the serve to the other side in volleyball, while in tennis it gives away a point when all the advantages are on one’s own side.

The situational pressures exist in the mind. In net sports, the mind and discipline remain supreme, I don’t care how supremely skilled or focused an athletes is the unexpected surprise and intimidation of physical contact, legal or illegal, designed to destroy a person’s concentration or skillful execution changes everything. It emphasizes another kind of bigger/faster/stronger to fight off physical battering.

The structure of each cluster of sports generates their own logic of completion and excellence.  Parallel competitive sports like swimming or a reset sport like football or volleyball/tennis have their own dynamics and logics. And these shape the type of training and person and dynamic and action. The net sports present their own logics of execution, precision and, above all, intense initiating and reactive intelligence.

Sports Ethics: Get Your Act Together

A couple months ago I read a story where Maria Sharapova at the U.S. Open (please don’t ask why I follow stories about Maria Sharapova). She had fallen behind in a match and during a break, her coach told her to  “get your act together.” We've all had moments when we have to tell ourselves this, and we’ve all had moments when coaches, bosses and friends look at us and simply say or scream “get your act together.” It’s good advice, foundational really. So what does it mean and why is it so ethically important?

This is an imperative phrase, an order to oneself. Like much sports oriented ethics urgency drives it.

The key when we use this phrase is that:

Things are NOT going well.

I may be losing or I may be ahead but losing momentum, or the momentum is shifting and my performance has become erratic enabling the opponent to take advantage of my weaknesses and flawed execution.

Things are not going well with my performance and the flow of the game. This might also mean that I am not playing at my highest level. More possibly my performance has devolved into inconsistent execution and decision-making.  This requires pulling oneself together and getting your act together.

In my case I usually use it when I am having a discussion with myself or among several selves with me/myself/I all disagreeing or pulling in different ways.  This internal disagreement implies two things. First, our internal self has fragmented and is pulling against itself. I, as a person, do not have a coherent and stable approach to the challenge before me and my performance suffers.

Second, this internal division undercuts my focus and stability of execution. One time I may focus upon one tactic, then another or I may lose aggressiveness and let my opponent dominate the tone of the play. Or the next moment I may be overly aggressive and not wait for the game to come to me. So I force bad plays rather than waiting for the right opening and pouncing much like Suz Tzu would suggest.

Operationally this means that my game and bahiavior become inconsistent and fighting each other. Consistency goes down leading to more inconsistency as I experiment with different options or different parts of my brain suggest different solutions. Cognitive efficiency decline as does cognitive unity of purpose and integration of perception, decision and action.

Now the language gives us a way out.

Get your act—orders the person to take responsibility for the situation. In sports and life the “get” is a bossy little word that demands attention and action. But the critical words here are ACT TOGETHER.

The word ACT means that the situation requires a person take on a role.

Being an elite athlete involves taking on and mastering a role. Mastering the skills and character and demands of the sport require that people take on a Role an Act—this act involves having a script and role.  We PLAY games just like we go to PLAYS.

Athletes play a part and take on a role. The role involves a strong level of scripting and practice to refine the skills and character. Good athletes like good actors invest their heart and soul and skills into the role they act out. They read, study and practice the character and role over and over.

Being an athlete is not the total identity of the person. It can become that just like being a lawyer or scientist or police officer can fill up a person’s entire identity. But the fact that it is a professional role and an act with a strong script enables a player to say “get your act together, Pat.”

This cognitive moment permits the athlete so recall the trained script, to remember the planned actions and the cues that other actors/players give out. More important the act requires, as in a play, constant annotations to address changes in the opponent or audience.

The athlete, like any good professional, takes a script and role—an ACT—but they must improvise within the role and go off script given the surprises and interactive nature of competition. They draw upon the character and the skills but as in improvisation respond to the cues and actions around them. During a time out, the coach an athlete may literally rewrite a script or add a new scene on the run.

This approach to life sets true athletics apart from the totally scripted and predictable world of professional wrestling with its scripted outcomes or the world of fixed athletics with its fixed outcomes. Athletes enter a competition with a script but no guaranteed outcome.

Athletic competition like professional life starts with learned skills and character that prepares us to play within the rules. But innovation occurs, situations change and opponents prove to be better or have developed new skills or to be more cognitively present and beat us.

So when Maria Sharapovo or any of us tells ourselves, Get your act together, this pushes us to remember the physical gestures and mental mind sets and perceptual pattern recognition that we rely upon to success. We need to take back on the role and unite our warring selves into one role, one person and one ACT where mind, perception and body engage the context.