Big Hoops: A Season in the Big East Conference.

• Author: Nocera, Joseph

Big Hoops: A Season in the Big East Conference.

Bill Reynolds. New American Library, $19.95. Well, so much for reforming college basketball. Not that the call for such reform has reached what you would call a roar, mind you, but did you see how much CBS agreed to pay the NCAA for the rights to its annual basketball gala, the Final Four? A billion dollars. It has long been known that college basketball has a peculiar appeal for television producers, combining as it does the rah-rah excitement of old-fashioned college sports with an extraordinarily high level of skill. But a billion dollars? That much money goes a long way towards justifying exploitation of the baldest sort and hypocrisy on the grandest of scales. That billion-dollar figure explains why college basketball cannot be reformed, at least not anytime soon, for it speaks to something that is elemental about college hoops today: it is the single greatest cash cow in all of sports - more so than college football (which has far fewer games and much greater overhead), and certainly more so than professional sports, which have to pay their performers something approaching their market value.

The Big East Conference, the subject of Bill Reynolds's book, which is written in the John Feinstein, A-Year-In-The-Life mold, is as good an example of the state of college basketball as you're likely to find. It was born a scant 11 years ago, the brainchild of former Providence College coach and athletic director Dave Gavitt, who is widely hailed as one of the great geniuses of sports marketing. His league was explicitly formed with an eye to major media markets: Georgetown brought the Washington market, St. John's the New York market, Villanova the Philly market, and so on. Pittsburgh became a member in order to preempt plans for a competing league. (Providence College, the team I root for, got in because Gavitt wanted to continue living in Providence.) The league makes gobs of money for all the schools; its own contract with CBS runs into the millions of dollars. Last year every game but one was televised (the Big East runs its own mini-television network); and so ruthless is Gavitt about having the league seem "big time" in every way that he actually forced Boston College to build a new, state-of-the-art gymnasium, with luxury boxes and the whole bit. Since Boston College is the league's perennial doormat, most of the new seats are empty. Not to worry: Gavitt forbids the cameramen to pan the...