Ruining NCAA rivalries.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - Column

It's difficult to believe or even remember that there was a time in my life when I was as year-round obsessed with college hoops as I was with the professional game. I grew up in New York City at the dawn of the Big East conference, and the quality of players, coaches, and rivalries has already become the stuff of legend. There was Coach John Thompson at Georgetown with a center named Ewing; Lou Carnesecca and his sweater at St. John's with a sweet shooting lefty named Chris Mullin and the great Walter Berry; Rollie Massimino and Ed Pinckney at 'Nova; and Jim Boeheim at Syracuse, led by a point guard named Pearl.

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The games on that newfangled ESPN were simply fantastic appointment television, with an intensity that transcended the NBA. In 1985, three Big East teams made the Final Four, and these rivalries, as much as any, gave us our modern March Madness and, not incidentally, the revenues that support the NCAA. The tournament's multibillion-dollar television contract produces 96 percent of the revenues for the NCAA's budget.

Now Jim Boeheim is the last of these great Big East coaches still working the sidelines. But soon he will be doing so for the Atlantic Coast Conference. Along with Pittsburgh, the Orange are leaving the Big East for good, and Boeheim has expressed his frustration that after all his decades of Hall of Fame-caliber hard work, the decision to move was out of his hands.

"There's two reasons: money and football," he said. "I spent thirty years in the Big East, so this will be hard for me. But the school has to do what's best for the school." Hoops money goes to the NCAA. Football money goes directly to the schools so football is always king, even at 'Cuse, where the hoops team is dynastic and the football team an afterthought.

This is just the most jarring iteration of what is called realignment, as conferences are regrouping into mega-conferences in a last-gasp effort to avoid financial Armageddon. More than 90 percent of athletic departments operate at staggering deficits, and the thought is that by consolidating, deficits can become surpluses. It's a Hail Mary pass that the television money that flows to football...