UConn reclaiming identity in Big East
Named UConn president the previous December, Susan Herbst started work in Storrs in mid-June 2011. Within three months the college athletic landscape was shaking. Pittsburgh and Syracuse were leaving the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference. By the time the furious pace of conference realignment slowed two years later, UConn was left with harsh questions and deep stains of red ink that to this day remain. Can football find any level of success? Will the annual
university subsidy that hit $42 million last year and could surpass $47 million this year effectively be narrowed during the coming decade? If not, and with the immediate realities of COVID-19, what is the future of Division I athletics at the state’s flagship university?
Among the questions, Herbst said, there is one answer of great stability (rejoining the Big East) and even greater comfort (Madison Square Garden).
She is certain of this. “A big part of the eight years I was UConn president, the most heartbreaking thing about the split with the Big East was losing the Garden,” Herbst said. “We felt like it was our place. I have to tell you every time I went in and out of Penn Station, I wanted to sob. I don’t think I was alone about that. UConn fans are very emotional about the Garden. We understand deeply: the greatest basketball arena, greatest city of the world.
“I can’t tell you how many sad conversations I had about losing the foothold in New York. It feels like our meeting place, our crossroads. Sure, we’re in Storrs and Farmington, all these places, but when you think about UConn alumni and our fans around the world, it’s the gravitational pull to New York and the Garden. It’s gigantic for us to go back to the place where all the magic happened.”
Born in New York City, raised in Peekskill, Herbst decided to continue teaching political science at UConn’s Stamford campus after she stepped down as president last August. Out of the direct line of fire, she speaks with a freer perspective.
“UConn was founded in 1881, but the truth is it doesn’t really turn into a research university like Michigan or Wisconsin until the 1940’s with president (Albert) Jorgensen,” Herbst said. “The 20th century was really about building our traditions, and our commitment to the Big East was one of those. The Big East made us. We made the Big East. It was our emotional focus. It was our grounding. In the chaotic world of college sports it gave us stability and rivalries. At a place with not so many traditions, the Big East was a big part of our identity, because we really hadn’t had one.
“UConn was a pretty quiet place. Outstanding faculty, lot of great research, but we hadn’t really bragged much about ourselves. Academics tend not to do that anyway. Sports can grab the public’s imagination. Jim Calhoun, Geno Auriemma, Ray Allen, they got people to look at the university, which is our goal for teaching and research. In a place that was not bragging on itself, basketball had swagger. It put us out there in a way that absolutely turned people toward, ‘Hey, what else is going on there?’ Great school of education. Great philosophy department. Look at engineering. That front porch thing about sports, UConn needed that much more than a lot of other places.”
From fly-by writers to the most intense UConn fans, folks tend to pick a year at UConn and form their athletic narrative. Still, there is no disputing that when UConn left the Big East in 2013 the athletic subsidy was a modest $9.1 million. Without the huge television and bowl payouts of the Power Five, the football program, embarking as an independent, had a $13 million deficit last year alone.
There is something interesting in Herbst’s reaching further back than others. Without a long history as a research school, UConn hasn’t been part of the Association of American Universities. Thirty-two are in the Power Five. And with no history as a major football school and a comparatively short one in basketball, there was no long-serving, fundraising war chest. This wasn’t so important when UConn joined Big East football. As a BCS league, the Big East had access to football’s pot of gold. The catch was the move had to work. Who would have guessed it would all fall apart within a decade? And UConn would be left getting 20, 30 times less money than Power Five schools?
This was the world Herbst entered in 2011.
“There was mass confusion,” Herbst said. “Presidents never thought they would be in this position. They are all fighting for their place. It’s highly professional, but it doesn’t make it any less emotional or less worrisome. I got there, all revved up, we’re in the Big East, so exciting, and then a few months later Pitt and Syracuse left. That was absolutely brutal.”
There was a Big East presidents meeting at Georgetown the first week of October 2011. Herbst remembers optimism.
“TCU had come to the table,” she said. “West
Virginia was still at the table. Notre Dame, Father (John) Jenkins was the president of the presidents. We were going to hold together. A few months later it was not together. A very tough fall. That stuff, it never left me. It was very, very hard.
“The presidents of the Big East, they were doing what they needed to do for how they saw things, especially after the mess of the ESPN deal (the Big East turned down a $1.17 billion offer earlier in 2011). I will say during the entire conference alignment business, as much emotion and terror was in it, I never felt any of the presidents were unprofessional or conniving. They were weighing a lot of variables in their own interest — as were we. For what it looked like on the outside, it was pretty gentlemanly and ladylike.”
Still, West Virginia left for the Big 12. Rutgers left for the Big Ten. TCU never showed. Boise State and San Diego State said forget it. The Big East basketball schools split.
And the ACC picked Louisville over UConn in late November 2012. The dagger. No, Herbst said, former athletic director Warde Manuel was not sunning himself during the basketball trip to the Paradise Jam on the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“The football stuff was the lynchpin,” Herbst said. “It was not in our control. Neither Warde nor I could change the path. Our football program (in FBS) was new. Our attendance was up and down. Louisville didn’t have such a better record at that point, but it was the commitment to it, Southern geography, the turnout, they packed the place. You can’t blame the ACC for wanting that. I read things like Warde was on the beach. It wasn’t true at all. We worked really hard. All we did was talk about it. Neither Warde nor I let anything go. And like Dave Benedict, he had a fabulous network around the country.
“The ACC knew how much we brought, basketball, academically, but they were, and still are, trying to make football work for them.”
Herbst let out a small chuckle.
“There was not a day in my presidency I wasn’t either worried about, thinking about, strategizing about, contacting people about conference realignment,” she said. “It was a hard eight years.”
As emotional as realignment was, Herbst said decisions were highly data driven. Expenditures, attendance, recruiting, TV deals, wins and losses were there to see. So, too, were the various proposals to the Big 12 before it decided ultimately not to expand in 2016. UConn’s pitch, their New York angle, their football designs, was there for everyone, including the Big East
“Absolutely, they were concerned about us leaving if they let us in,” Herbst said. “It’s hard to deny when our pitch to the Big 12 is publicly published. We want to be big-time football. Paid our coaches a lot. They were absolutely right to be worried. Over time, they started to understand what the Big East brought to us and how much we needed it.”
In the meantime, Group of Five schools — and worst of all UConn, carrying 24 sports — hemorrhaged money. Last month, Herbst’s successor, Thomas Katsouleas, oversaw UConn cutting four sports.
“It’s a very hard decision to drop sports, painful,” Herbst said. “These are athletes who love their sports, go on to become leaders in life, exactly what college athletics are supposed to be about.”
In truth, COVID-19 didn’t cut those sports as much as football did.
“Look, if we can fill that stadium all the time the way we thought we would be able to, some of the problems would be less without question — that’s the critical point,” Herbst said. “That’s why we worked so hard on attendance and getting people engaged. We made that decision. There are more hard decisions as the budget gets tougher.
“We were never a wealthy school. My reading of UConn and UConn athletics is they were never in it for the money like maybe some others. We invested in it just like you invest in academic departments. Most are not going to turn a profit. Our calculus was all about building the university’s brand and give some real joy to the students and the state of
Connecticut.
“Looking back, I’m talking way back, decades ago, could we have made different kinds of decisions that wouldn’t have put us in this hole? I don’t know. It’s hard to know how you would have done it exactly. When you’re out for excellence like Jim and Geno, you had to have money to build. How do you do it on the cheap?”
You can’t, not with 85 football scholarships and national demands for stunning practice facilities.
“Like the other New England publics we didn’t have the big fundraising bases that would have helped,” Herbst said. “If we had built our fundraising structure earlier, we would have had endowments for athletic scholarships and all that. That would have helped.”
One thing Herbst isn’t going to do is bad mouth the American Athletic Conference, which extracted a $17 million exit fee to be paid incrementally to 2026.
“We all had our idiosyncrasies, all in slightly different positions,” she said. “We knew we needed each other. Being with the current presidents and ADs a lot (as chairman of the AAC Board for a time), I thought it was extraordinarily congenial and honest. When we said we were going to the Big East last summer, no question it was a surprise to them. But I thought the whole thing was pretty classy. They understood. They didn’t like it. They weren’t thrilled with us, but they’ll do what they have to do. It’s a strong league.
“It was the hardest for me with Mike Aresco. Along with a few others, I felt like I helped him build The American. I like Mike a lot. I respect him a lot. Leaving was a surprise. It was not good. There was some fraught conversation. In the end, I think of him as an excellent leader and a great friend. It was never about the push with the AAC. It was about the pull. We never stamped around and said we want out. It’s horrible. Far from it. It was the pull of when something better comes along for the university you just have to go.”
UConn had to go to the Big East.
“The upper echelon of college sports is maledominated, and working with (Big East commissioner) Val Ackerman was my great honor,” Herbst said. “She is excellent. Powerful, smart, strategic. She’s a Northeast person. She understood viscerally why the Garden and old rivalries, schools closer to us, matter so much to UConn.”
You’d think someone who has made a life study of everyone from Machiavelli to Donald Trump may have walked away with a jaundiced view of major college sports. You’d think wrong.
“I’m still very much on the positive side,” said Herbst, who served on the NCAA Board of Governors. “When you get down to the texture of college sports, from the most successful football to whatever Olympic sport you want to choose, there is an undeniable pure and joy to it. People roll their eyes when the NCAA says that. I used to, too, until I got more engaged. The presidents and commissioners can fight and try to make the most money, but on the ground where the coaches, athletes and fans are, it’s still a beautiful thing.”
None more beautiful than March at the Garden.