A Movable East

One day in December 1979, while contemplating the basketball-first athletic conference he'd helped originate earlier that summer, Dave Gavitt, the Big East's first commissioner, confessed a simple hope. "One of our goals," said Gavitt, who was also the athletic director at Providence, "is that at the end of our first year, no one asks, 'What's the Big East?' and 'Who's in the Big East?'"

Gavitt passed away in September, before he could watch his original—and wildly successful—vision mutate into the confusing, wholly football-centered constellation that the Big East will resemble come 2013. Amid a barrage of questions, consider three of the biggest distortions to the national college basketball landscape.