As confetti rained courtside, an earnest Dan Hurley sat behind the podium beneath Lucas Oil Stadium as he fought to get the words out.
Hurley, the hellfire spewing, performative frontman for UConn basketball always has the words. Just not in this moment.
“It’s like, this is where you wanted to be,” Hurley said. “It hasn’t set in yet. On the flight tomorrow it’ll set in, on the bus ride back. Eventually it’ll hit you that you were close to pulling off what would have been a historic third championship.
“But this team just gave us so much this year. Just didn’t make enough shots.”
What ended in disappointment for the Huskies still marks a remarkable run for the Big East Conference as it fights to maintain its place at the table in a consolidating world.
There’s a push-pull in the orbit the Big East ought to occupy. It has neither the cash or cachet of the Big Ten and SEC to dictate the terms of the entire ecosystem. Its football-less ways also put it below the ACC and Big 12 in this world’s pecking order.
But armed with a basketball product that has churned out five of the last nine national titles, there’s a question as to what the Big East’s voice in the future iterations of college sports ought to be.
Through the NCAA’s reshuffling of its governance structure in recent months, the Big East was granted a weighted voting seat on the men’s basketball committee a la its Power Four compatriots. Is that enough to maintain and elevate as the enterprise increasingly seems poised for consolidation? We’ll see.
There are plenty within the ecosystem who would tell you basketball is undervalued and that it ought to be a bigger piece to the discussion of how college sports works. For the Big East, that’d be a perfect scenario.
“100% [it’s undervalued],” UConn Athletic Director David Benedict told Sports Business Journal. “I can’t sit here and say like, ‘Hey, the TV deal should be X,’ but, look, just on our campus in what we’re seeing and feeling related to real corporate [deals] … if you look at since the selection shows, the number of our student athletes that have been on national television deals and the money that’s associated with those things, that would say there’s a significant value.
“Obviously viewership is up across the board. I think it may not be an undervalued conversation. It’s the distribution that’s associated with basketball and the membership is undervalued. Our student athletes and basketball are not getting their fair share because 75% of what’s being generated from this tournament is being distributed in a different way than it is directly to the institutions or the conferences like the CFP does.”
