Lost cause

Tranghese appears powerless to prevent Big East exodus

With the college sports world anxiously awaiting whether Miami, Syracuse and Boston College will bolt to the ACC, the Big East's five remaining football schools, facing a possible implosion of their conference, have pinned their hopes on the shoulders of league commissioner Mike Tranghese.

The best he could come up with was a guilt trip?

Besides Big Ten power-monger Jim Delany, Tranghese, who's held his position for 13 years, carries as much political clout as any figure in college athletics. He oversaw the inception of Big East football and its inclusion in the Bowl Championship Series, has served as chairman of both the BCS and the NCAA men's basketball committee and helped negotiate the NCAA tournament's landmark $6 billion deal with CBS.

"I believe he's the best commissioner in the country," Rutgers athletic director Robert Mulcahy said during this week's Big East meetings in Ponte Vedra, Fla.

That said, we expected to at least hear some sort of formal counterproposal come out of the league meetings earlier this week, some legitimate reason why Miami should turn its back on the ACC's potential riches.

Instead, all we got was an angry tirade from Tranghese, who seems genuinely baffled at the ACC and Hurricanes' audacity.

"This," said Tranghese, "will be the most disastrous blow to intercollegiate athletics in my lifetime."

Huh?

One can hardly blame Tranghese for venting his personal frustrations and for making every attempt possible to protect his constituency.

But some of the things he said Monday were at best naive, at worst manipulative.

The death of Big East football may be the most disastrous event in which Tranghese was personally one of the victims. But are we really supposed to believe that the abolition of a 24-year-old league with a modest-at-best following is more significant than was the demise of the historic Southwest Conference after 81 years? More troubling than the barrage of college basketball scandals just this past March?

"If I were IBM, I'd understand it," Tranghese said of the ACC's ruthless tactics. "I'm not IBM. I represent 14 educational institutions."

Pretending college athletics don't operate under the same rules as big business? Now that's a hoot. Any such pretenses were officially crushed the day Tranghese and his five commissioner cohorts formed the $525 million monster that is the BCS.

Conference poaching is hardly a new phenomenon. The SEC did it. It's how the Big 12 came to be. And did the Big East not do much the same thing as the ACC now when it poached Rutgers and West Virginia from the Atlantic 10 in the mid-'90s?

The best guess here is that Tranghese's anger is directed less at the actual exodus than the perceived devious manner in which the ACC went about the process.

According to a source with first-hand knowledge, the ACC began formally researching expansion about 18 months ago, and among the options it explored was adding as many as six Big East teams. Yet that league's commissioner, John Swofford, didn't own up to any of it until Tranghese's first public accusations last month, and even then the process was much farther along than he indicated.

However, if not the ACC, someone else probably would have come along and done the same thing eventually. While successful on the field, the Big East's spot in the marketplace has always been shaky at best. Its TV deal is good but not great. Its odd mix of football and basketball-only schools makes for a confusing identity. And while a couple of its teams, Miami and Syracuse, hold great tradition, others, such as Rutgers and Temple, are more suited for I-AA than the BCS.

If you're Tranghese, the best thing you can do right now is forget Miami.

Like it or not, Miami is doing what's best for Miami. The Hurricanes, despite what he suggests, don't owe the league anything. Without them, the Big East never would have had a football conference in the first place.

It's time to forget about the perceived slight by Miami and focus on more realistic goals.

One of them, toward which Tranghese apparently took a step this week, would be attempting to retain Syracuse and Boston College.

Based on previous comments by their athletic directors, the two schools seem motivated less by an actual desire to join the ACC, where they seem ill-suited, than to save their own butts if Miami leaves. According to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Tranghese obtained assurances at the meetings from the league's other football schools that none would leave if Syracuse and BC stay.

A Big East lacking Miami but retaining the rest of its membership would still be relatively strong in football, and the league's basketball prestige would remain in tact. The problem with that scenario, though, is there'd be no guarantee the league retains its BCS status come 2005, a possibility that be could be enough to scare away the Orangemen and Eagles.

If that happens, Tranghese will need to have a contingency plan in place before all hell breaks loose. According to the The Daily News of New York, one proposal discussed Tuesday -- authored by original Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt -- would create two separate leagues under one umbrella. One would be for the all-sports schools, the other for the basketball-only schools, both of which would add new members and would play at least a partial schedule against each other in basketball.

It's a long way from happening, but it's the most realistic plan we've heard yet.

Certainly more so than the "Can't we all just get along?" pitch to Miami.

Stewart Mandel covers college sports for SI.com.

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