An ACC-Big East Alliance: Is It Time?
Quite possibly so.
After Mike Krzyzewski first brought up the idea of a super league with a merger between the ACC and the Big East, St. John’s coach Rick Pitino picked up on it on his side of things, saying that “I have been trying to get them to start a super-league, a basketball league. Get up to 18 teams or 16 teams. Eleven is just not enough. Right now, a little bit like the ACC, we aren’t like the Big East of the past where we were getting, 8, 9 or 10 teams left. We just can’t see that there is a lot of money to be made down the road if we set up a super league. We need to do something about that in the Big East, and I think the coaches are in favor of a super league. I just think the presidents are against it.”
Of course the ACC is already up to 18 teams and with the 11 from the Big East, that would put the new league at 29.
And it could bring up the problem that wrecked the old Big East all over again: some teams would have football and some wouldn’t.
We know how that worked out.
However, there are ways this could conceivably work.
First, the leagues could maintain their current structures and simply market themselves together. Then, somewhat like Notre Dame with football, the leagues could commit to a certain number of inter-league games. So you could, for instance, see Duke and UConn in November or UNC and St. John’s in December. You could schedule a holiday tournament with the best 4-6 teams from each league.
The other option of course would be British-style relegation.
The top level would have, say, 10 teams. The next ten could play home-and-home against each other and then you’d have the likes of Miami and DePaul playing each other in the bottom of the league.
What would make this more interesting would be if a rising team could be accommodated. Take Louisville, for instance.
Not much was expected from the Cards this season, yet they proved they were really good. We wouldn’t want to be the ones to figure out how to hot plug teams in and out of different levels, but it’s a solvable problem.
Realistically though the first option is more likely: brand it the ACC-Big East or ACC-BE, go to ESPN or Fox and strike a deal based on tons of inventory and creative scheduling.
We know this would not be easy to do, but imagine that there were slots in the schedule that were left open on say a Saturday in January. Then let the fans vote on who they wanted to see in that slot. That could get interesting fast. Danny Hurley would personally vote 10,000 times to get Duke into Gampel.
An alliance would put the leagues in New York,Philadelphia, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Milwaukee, the Bay Area and the Triangle, with multiple other spots as well.
Anyway, there are clearly problems with this and it would be a great job for someone like the late Tom Mickle to figure out. But the problems would be solvable and it would certainly be an interesting development. And having Duke, St. John’s, Villanova, UConn, UNC and Georgetown in the same structure would be potent.