Dave Gavitt
- Thread starter RutgHoops
- Start date
The basketball conference was great. The tourney at msg was something else
Love we're in the B1G...a dream most of us never thought would happen.
But a TRUE all sports NE conference would have been something else to see.
To be fair, we had Penn State, Pittsburgh, Villanova (playing D-I at the time before dropping football and later bringing it back at the lower level) AND West Virginia all with us in the original Eastern 8. It wasn't totally absurd to think any future Eastern conference would start from there.
BUT obviously, considering where our basketball team was in the second half of the 1970s, it was insane to not at least go to the meeting and listen. As far as I know, we didn't even go and they moved on without us. Is it possible that being open-minded enough to listen to the pitch could have turned the tide? Yep. You have to believe it could have. But we really weren't standing on an island with Penn State begging for an all-sports conference the way some Rutgers fans make it sound.
Yeah, there are arguments both ways, but at the same time, it was a different era, and being a football independent was viable. And at the end of the day, if you were going to create a northeast football conference, you were going to have to pull Syracuse and BC out of the Big East or vice versa. Jumping in with the stronger basketball schools at that time would have made sense.
Besides being a great admin and coach Gavitt was a great guy . I went to Providence my freshman year, the year after Marvin left, and he was always around the campus. PC was a lot smaller back then and he would be at the Student Center almost daily. He actually would show up to watch intramurals every once and a while.
We had the last laugh and were right all along. Reason and shame no great Eastern Conference. Ask UConn how it turned out.
My understanding was the idea of an Eastern Conference would have more or a rectangular table feel than a round one....more like how the other schools in the BigXII feel about Texas. With Penn Sate obviously playing the part of Texas. And unless it was going to be all for one and one for all it probably would have had it issues too with maybe a split down the road.
The only school with the football horsepower to say No to Paterno was Pitt...and they did. No Eastern Conference.
If the Big East and Eastern 8 had split teams along football lines instead of forming 2 separate basketball conferences, maybe things would have ended up differently. But we're in a great spot now.
No disagreement there.
And I think Pitt realized what we thought it could be like (Penn State and the rest of us) and decided to go a different direction.