The Big East was left for dead. Now, it's not only surviving, but thriving

With UConn's most recent title standing as evidence, the reconfigured conference was right: it's possible to build a modern league around basketball

After the confetti had fallen and all but a select handful of the 74,000 inside State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., had walked out of the building and into the night, a few strands connecting the net to one of the rims still remained.

UConn knew just the person to take care of it.

The Huskies had just won their second consecutive national championship, blowing past Purdue, 75-60. The victorious side, as it always does after winning an NCAA championship, had various players, coaches and staff members climb up a ladder, clip pieces from one of the nets and, if only for a second, gaze over the scene of their triumph and soak in everything that moment has to offer.

As they neared the end of that process, they handed the scissors over not to a member of the program or even the university itself, but Big East commissioner Val Ackerman.

It was an unusual inclusion – an administrator who wasn’t part of the grueling summer workouts, early morning practices or lengthy film sessions that bond a team and make those championship celebrations that much sweeter – but in UConn’s case, it felt all too fitting.

Just six years earlier, what the Huskies accomplished by winning even one championship would have been implausible. At that time, they were an outpost in the geographically amorphous American Athletic Conference, one that was watching their proud, hard-earned basketball preeminence slip rapidly away from them after missing the NCAA Tournament for the third time in four seasons and firing a beloved former player in what would be a prolonged and contentious split. 

On this desert night in early April, though, UConn won its sixth NCAA title – tying it with North Carolina while moving it past Duke and Indiana – and did so in dominant fashion, winning each of its six NCAA Tournament games by double figures for the second time in as many years. It managed to pull that off despite losing four of its top seven scorers from the previous year’s championship team, the kind of roster turnover that was supposed to make back-to-back titles a practical impossibility in modern college basketball.

Yet here the Huskies were. An entity that could have understandably been left for dead had not only survived, but managed to thrive.

The same could be said for the league it once again represented.

How the Old Big East became the New Big East

With UConn’s most recent title, the Big East has been able to claim four of the past eight national champions – Villanova in 2016 and 2018, UConn in 2023 and 2024.

Though that might change with its most recent addition to the trophy case, the Big East is regularly caught in an unusual position. It’s a living and, by a slew of measurements, successful entity, but it’s often discussed as a symbol of nostalgia, a basketball ghost. The “Old Big East” has been a subject of so much reminiscing that the phrase itself has become something of a trope.

In reality, the conference exists in a very similar form to what it was in its halcyon days in the 1980s – a collection of small, Catholic and basketball-centric schools, several of which are perennial national title contenders.

The long, fraught road it took to get to that point, though, is why the Big East is so often discussed in the past tense.