The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s time for your bracket
... it’ll be Mike Aresco, ultimate optimist. He still finds hope as schools flee, conference loses even its name.
The teams in the NCAA tournament will be announced at 6 p.m. today on CBS. It is time to start filling in your bracket,
NEW YORK – The well-wishers came in waves, old friends and new colleagues, television bigwigs and college presidents, all in search of Mike Aresco, commissioner of the Big East Conference. (Or what’s left of it. Before more teams are added and subtracted. Before they call it something else.)
As the valedictory conference basketball tournament continued in all its sentimental glory, Aresco arrived at Madison Square Garden early one day last week. He wore a gray pinstripe suit, a red tie and, as his preferred expression, a smile. Where others mistook his rounds for a funeral procession, for a portrait of the end, Aresco peddled hope and sold opportunity and projected confidence.
Aresco, by both nature and necessity, is perhaps the most optimistic man in sports.
At Tufts, in graduate school, he fixated on a plaque in the library, the one with a quotation from Edward R. Murrow: Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.
Later, when Aresco interviewed with ESPN, an acquaintance, a federal judge, told him that he was out of his mind, that a 24-hour sports concept would never work. Aresco took the job. That turned out all right.
So there Aresco sat last week, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon and wheat toast; after another meeting with a television executive; inside Dressing Room 1, the conference headquarters for the tournament. The perpetual spin cycle of conference realignment continued unabated. Aresco looked forward to a temporary break.
“You ready to watch some basketball?” he asked. “That will be a relief.”
Aresco became the Big East commissioner in August, and as one month cascaded into two, then six, it felt, he said, “like drinking from a fire hose.” Notre Dame announced it would depart for the Atlantic Coast Conference. Rutgers decided to head to the Big Ten. Louisville planned its jump to the ACC.
As Aresco acclimated to a job as difficult as any post in sports, the landscape shifted, continually, underneath his feet. The parameters changed daily. Every game he attended, reporters shoved microphones in his face. His wife had to remind him to eat. Critics tagged his league Conference USA 2.0 and Conference We’ll Take Anyone.
If those departures early in his tenure seemed difficult, they represent what Aresco called “the halcyon days” in hindsight. That was before Boise State and San Diego State bolted having never actually arrived, before seven Catholic universities decided to split and form a basketball conference and pay for the old name, before Aresco signed a television deal with ESPN for the Conference Formerly Known as the Big East.
The past seven months, Aresco said, “felt like seven years.”
He was asked if that had aged him. He looked around for his tournament credential before he answered. He could not find it.
“I think I still look the same,” he joked, adding: “I’ve termed our conference a conference of opportunity. I consider us a challenger brand. I still feel that way.”
“Mike is a quintessential leader,” said Kevin White, the athletic director at Duke. “He has always been inordinately empathetic, extremely adaptable and, without question, passionate, perhaps to a fault. He was the perfect professional to conduct this symphony, which can only be characterized as a future case study within the annals of intercollegiate athletics.”
For all the challenges that Aresco inherited, his background seemed tailored to the task. His television contacts – he helped negotiate the rights for the NCAA tournament and the Southeastern Conference deal for CBS – meant he knew the major players. Having grown up in Connecticut, he was also familiar with the conference. Dave Gavitt, the Big East founder, was a mentor, the former commissioner Mike Tranghese a longtime friend.
Aresco traveled for most of the first few months in the job. He went to football games, visited campuses, shook a few hundred hands. He tried to reverse the narrative that had taken hold, of a doomed conference, the entity left out of realignment. He promised the Big East would “reinvent itself again.”
Aresco made his way across the court last week, to the ESPN table, where he exchanged pleasantries with broadcaster Mike Patrick. Patrick referenced all the recent movement, the teams on their way out, those on their way in.
“The dust will start settling soon,” Aresco said.
Or so he hoped. There was optimism over the ESPN contract, which still needs to be approved by the conference’s board, which is composed of the presidents of the member colleges. Still, at about $130 million over seven years, the deal is far smaller than one the conference turned down two years ago.
Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Louisville and Notre Dame will leave. So will Rutgers. So will the socalled Catholic 7 – St. John’s, Seton Hall, Marquette, DePaul, Georgetown, Villanova and Providence – to form the new Big East, a basketball conference, like the original.
Aresco said his conference, soon to be unnamed and named again, will sign a second television deal “fairly soon.” He did not elaborate about the deal; negotiations are continuing.
Aresco sees all of this as an opportunity, of course.
“It gives us a fresh start,” he said. “It gives this group a chance to make its own history. It’s essentially almost a new conference.”