Holy Cross could have joined the Big East. So why didn’t it?

The small liberal arts school in Massachusetts could have been part of the transformative conference. The impact of its decision still lingers.

It’s a slow time of year in the world of college sports, with LSU’s championship in last month’s College World Series marking the end of the 2024-25 athletic calendar. Because of that, I’ll focus these next few weeks on something that never seems to have an expiration date, even when no games are taking place – conference realignment.

July will be Realignment Month over at The Front Porch, where I’ll take a look at realignment past – with some moves that happened and others that that nearly did but didn’t – as well as its present, as the college sports landscape continues to reshape itself into form.

If there’s a particular subject you want me to explore, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at bycraigmeyer@gmail.com. I’ve got some stories in mind, but I’m always open to new ideas and suggestions.

There’s perhaps no conference in college sports, not even the obnoxiously mighty and powerful SEC, that’s as mythologized as the Big East.

The league, at least the original iteration of it, was centered around some of the largest population centers in the northeast, making their schools a natural point of focus in some of the country’s largest, wealthiest and most influential cities. It had a distinct identity in men’s basketball, with an unmistakably physical style of play and boisterous coaches. Due to a fortuitous and symbiotic relationship with ESPN, its games regularly aired across the country, opening basketball fans across the country up to schools like Seton Hall, UConn or Providence that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about or, at the very least, seldom thought of.

If you hear someone rhapsodize about how college basketball used to be better – with tougher players and more captivating coaches – there’s a close-to-100-percent chance they’ll reference the Big East at some point.

Though a previous version of the league collapsed, the Big East still stands as one of the unquestionable success stories of modern college athletics, an entity that, literally, rose from nothing and within six years of its inception had three teams in a single Final Four.

Because of its relative infancy – the conference began operations in 1979 – it’s possible to look back at the Big East earliest moves through a modern lens. This isn’t the University of Chicago leaving the Big Ten or Sewanee bolting the SEC. Hell, the league is seven years younger than The Rock.

Given that, I wanted to take a look back at one of more intriguing and often overlooked hypotheticals in the Big East’s history:

What if Holy Cross – yes, Holy Cross – took up the Big East’s offer and joined the league when it formed?

Why Holy Cross actually made sense for the Big East

Though it exists today as an athletic afterthought nationally, Holy Cross was once a bit of a powerhouse.

In 1949, the Crusaders' football team played in the Orange Bowl against Miami. Three years later, their baseball team won the College World Series. To this day, they remain the only program from the northeast to have won the event.

It was on the basketball court, though, where Holy Cross made its greatest mark. Led by Bob Cousy, the Crusaders won the NCAA championship in 1947 and advanced to the Final Four the following season. They made it to the Elite Eight in two other seasons, in 1950 and 1953. In the ensuing decade, once Cousy was in the early stages of a legendary career with the Boston Celtics, another future Basketball Hall of Famer, Tommy Heinsohn, helped guide Holy Cross to several NCAA Tournament and NIT berths, including an NIT championship in 1954.

Though the program fell off a bit for much of the 1960s and early 1970s, it eventually regained its footing. Under coach George Blaney, a Holy Cross alum, the Crusaders won at least 20 games five times over a seven-year stretch from 1974-81. Their 1976-77 team won the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) North championship by beating a Providence team that was ranked No. 8 in the Associated Press poll at the time of the matchup. They advanced to the NCAA Tournament, where they led top-ranked Michigan at halftime before losing 92-81, capping off a 23-6 season. The following season, they were ranked as high as No. 12 in the AP poll.

All of this is to say that Holy Cross was a viable, regionally relevant basketball program at the time the Big East was starting to come together in the late 1970s.

The conference came together out of necessity. The schools that came to make up the Big East, several of which are still in the league today, were part of the ECAC, a loose confederation of about 150 northeastern schools with varying athletic ambitions. It included both burgeoning national powers like Syracuse and Georgetown, as well as schools that now play at the Division III level.

As changing NCAA rules made it increasingly advantageous to be a part of a conference, a group of schools and athletic directors, led by Providence’s Dave Gavitt, sought to create a northeastern league that could eventually rival the Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC in success and prestige. While selecting schools, a few factors were at the front of mind. Men’s basketball success, of course, was the first, making schools like Syracuse, Georgetown and St. John’s no-brainers. Schools in large media markets were prioritized, too, as a way to increase the visibility of a program while capitalizing on increasingly valuable television contracts to air games.

Holy Cross fit many of those criteria.

Though they weren’t the championship program they were 30 years earlier with Cousy, the Crusaders were still quite good. Beyond their string of 20-win seasons and postseason berths, they had fared quite well against the teams that would initially make up the Big East in the years leading up to the league’s formation. From 1974-78, they had gone 8-2 against Boston College, including a six-game win streak. They went 4-2 against Providence in six meetings between 1975-77. They were 11-5 in their previous 16 meetings against Seton Hall and even more dominant against UConn, with a 25-5 record in their previous 30 matchups. Even against two of the conference’s pillars, Georgetown and Syracuse, they were 5-4 and 5-3, respectively, in their most recent games.

While Holy Cross’ hometown of Worcester, Mass. wasn’t nearly as large as nearby Boston, it was still one of the largest cities in New England. Its population ranked it 92nd among American cities in the 1980 census, ahead of future Big East markets like Providence (100th) and Hartford (outside the top 100) and not terribly far behind others, like Syracuse (86th). The school’s enrollment was (and remains) small, with about 3,000 undergrads, but it wasn’t drastically tinier than Providence or Seton Hall.

Like many of its fellow Big East invitees, the Crusaders had a cozy, on-campus arena, but had a much larger venue nearby that it could have played bigger games in – what is now known as the DCU Center, a 13,000-seat arena in downtown Worcester that broke ground in 1977 and opened in 1982.

All of this raises an important and unavoidable question – if Holy Cross made sense for the Big East, why didn’t it join it?