Villanova Head Coach Jay Wright analogized Big East basketball to SEC football. Seriously, he did.
Maybe Wright should see the ESPN Films 30 for 30 “Requiem for the Big East” (review here). Or perhaps he’s seen only the beginning and middle of the documentary. The Big East is a shell of what it was once, which makes Wright’s comments below a bit absurd.
Wright was a guest on CBS Sports Network’s “We Need to Talk,” a show that broke new ground and made history.
All of college athletics is different now. Everything is changing. So what we really talk to (recruits) about is that we’re still the only basketball league, in metropolitan areas. Every school in our league is a basketball school. When they have a homecoming, the most important thing that they do is come to a basketball game. When there’s a basketball game at any of these places – and you look at the venues in the Big East, they are great places to play – you’re going to play in a hotbed of basketball. I kind of compare it to the SEC in football. The Southeast is football. The SEC is football. Well, in the Northeast it’s basketball. This is a basketball conference. If you’re a baller and you want to play basketball, this is the place to be.
Does Jay Wright realize that the SEC won seven national titles in a row before Florida State (ACC) ended the streak? The Southeastern conference is in a totally different league, high above the rest of college football. The Big East did indeed provide the national champion in 2013 (Louisville) and 2011 (UConn), 2004 (UConn) and Syracuse (2003).
However, none of those teams are in the league right now. They weren’t in the league last season either.
Butler played in the national title game in both 2010 and 2011, but that was before they joined the Big East. The last team in the current league to win it all, Jay Wright’s Wildcats. However, it was way back in 1985. The year before Nova cur down the nets, another team in the current Big East, Georgetown, became champions. So the SEC comparison Jay Wright made is beyond ridiculous. But I get it, he’s really talking more about the culture, and the value placed on the game and the sport by the local community.
Well, he’s way off on that too. SEC football is a de facto AAA affiliate of the NFL. Only programs like Kentucky, Kansas, Duke and North Carolina can make that claim these days. None of those programs reside in the Big East.
Jay Wright is correct about how football rules in the south, but hoops isn’t exactly king in the northeast. In the south, SEC football trumps everything. In the northeast, other sports are ahead of college basketball. And there are plenty of other things to do other than sports in those metropolitan areas that he spoke of. What Wright can never say, but should say is that no one cares about college basketball in the deep deep south, and that no one cares about college football in the northeast.
But no coach would ever say that.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and very often writes The Sports Bank.net ,which is partners with Fox Sports. Read his features stories in the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. Listen to him on 1620 The Zone. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks). His work has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including The Washington Post and ESPN 2