The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The long road home
A look at the anatomy of the Huskies’ return to the Big East
On June 19, 2019, UConn athletic director David Benedict spent 21⁄2 hours on a conference call with the American Athletic Conference finance committee.
There was a lot on the agenda, so much that Benedict, the committee chairman, suggested they arrive early to the AAC’s football media day in Newport, R.I. in a couple of weeks to get in some more work. He’d even arrange for a golf outing.
Benedict is the type of person who likes to be as direct and transparent as possible with people. However, he was harboring a secret that no one at the AAC, and only a very small circle of people at UConn, knew. A secret that would make his involvement with the AAC finance committee moot.
UConn was leaving the American and going back to the Big East.
It was remarkable the secret had been kept under wraps for so long, especially with UConn in the midst of a presidential transition, and with several other people and entities needing to sign off on the deal.
One national basketball writer just about had the story and had been calling Benedict nearly every day for three weeks, but could never quite confirm it. However, on June 21 — a Friday evening — the news broke via a most unlikely source.
Terry Lyons, a St. John’s alum who worked in NBA public relations for 25 years and now runs his own website, Digital Sports Desk, had gotten wind of UConn’s move earlier in the week — first at the NBA Draft, then at the Travelers Championship in Cromwell.
By Saturday morning, Lyons’ story had the attention of national media and fans alike. After years of rumors, UConn’s return to the Big East — which had nearly happened a few years earlier, only to die on the vine due to UConn’s continued hope of someday joining a Power
Five conference, only to gain steam again when the school finally decided to abandon those hopes — was actually happening.
Huskies fans were ecstatic. AAC officials were shocked. Sure, they knew UConn wasn’t overly happy about its conference situation. Longterm employees dating back to the original Big East had also witnessed West Virginia, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and later Louisville, Rutgers and the “Catholic 7” depart the league.
But they didn’t see this one coming.
Needless to say, Benedict wasn’t invited to the finance committee meeting in Newport, and there was no golf event. He did show up to the AAC football media day. In fact, UConn’s departure has largely been
handled with class by both sides.
Benedict was confident he had made the right decision for his athletic program. That point was hammered home a few weeks later, while attending one of his son’s baseball games. A man Benedict recognized asked him to come meet his 7-yearold son, who had something to tell him.
“I thought he was gonna give me a high-five or something,” Benedict recalled.
Benedict bent down, and the youngster knocked off the AD’s UConn hat while proclaiming, “St. John’s is gonna kick your butt!”
“That is the stuff we’ve been missing,” Benedict related. “That father and son, even though they’re not our fans, they’re gonna be in our arena when we play St. John’s. We haven’t had that. I can’t wait to see our fan base show up at Providence or Seton Hall, and I also can’t wait for them to be in our arenas.”
The feeling, apparently, is mutual.
“I think it’s a great thing,” said Providence athletic director Robert Driscoll. “I’ve always been a UConn fan. It’s a blue-blooded college basketball program. Having been in the Big East for 20 years, I think it was a real loss when we were no longer playing them. With our fans, it’ll be the biggest game on our schedule.”
After a long and winding seven-year road, UConn, a charter member of the Big East, officially returns home on July 1.
“It’ll actually be even better than it was before, in one sense, because of the excitement that goes with being back,” said UConn’s Hall of Fame women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma. “Because we’ve been gone so long, going back to it … I can’t imagine you’re gonna be able to get a ticket to any men’s Big East game.”
A NEAR-DEAL GOES DEAD IN THE WATER
If there was one theme to Susan Herbst’s eight years as UConn’s 15th president, in terms of athletics, it was getting the school’s conference situation right.
“We were like a feather in the wind of conference realignment,” Herbst, who stepped down as president in 2019 and is now a professor at UConn’s Stamford campus, told Hearst Connecticut Media. “I felt like we were getting battered and blown around. It wasn’t any particular person’s fault, or commissioner or league. We were caught in kind of a perfect storm.”
In 2012, UConn was beaten out by Louisville for a final spot in the ACC, a crushing blow. A few years later, there was a flirtation with the Big 12 that ultimately fell short when that league decided not to expand. Always, a return home loomed.
“In my gut,” said Herbst, “there was always this feeling that it’s not gonna be right until we’re back in the Big East.”
Within a month of replacing Warde Manuel as UConn’s AD in March, 2016, Benedict was in Jim Calhoun’s office at the Werth Family Champions Center, asking for the Hall of Fame former Husky coach’s thoughts about returning to the Big East.
“There was no doubt in my mind that there was nothing wrong with the American, and I mean that very honestly,” Calhoun recalled. “I used the example that Gonzaga did just fine.
But, with the emergence of Villanova being a national power … and other programs moving up, I just thought the Big East was one of the three or four best basketball leagues in the country, and what a good thing it would be for us. And you take all the other things — from recruiting to where you’re gonna play to travel — it would be a great thing.”
Calhoun also had informal conversations with Herbst, board of trustees member Tom Ritter and others.
“I wasn’t asked about football, just basketball,” Calhoun added. “UConn basketball is much, much better in the Big East.”
By several accounts, UConn’s return to the Big East started picking up steam around 2017. The Big East seemed very receptive, but was worried about one thing: If the ACC or another Power Five conference came calling, would UConn bolt?
UConn couldn’t give any assurances. It had a football program to worry about, and the allure of Power Five dollars was simply too great. According to sources, the Big East looked for ways to ensure UConn would stay put, in the form of either exorbitant entry or exit fees — or both. UConn wouldn’t go for it.
Football was a deal-breaker. UConn’s return to the Big East was dead in the water. In fact, any potential move was hardly broached — if at all — when Dan Hurley interviewed for the UConn men’s job in March, 2018, following Kevin Ollie’s dismissal.
Soon, however, there was a gradual realization that UConn wasn’t getting a P5 invite any time soon. There was also dissatisfaction with the AAC’s new TV deal, which essentially gave all of the conference’s rights to ESPN and put the UConn women’s basketball team’s important partnership with SNY in jeopardy — though Benedict called the widelyheld notion that the TV deal was the defining factor to leave the AAC “wholly inaccurate.”
“What does that have to do with the impact (being in the AAC) has on recruiting in men’s basketball?,” he asked, rhetorically. “It has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with the excitement our fan base has in returning to the Big East, playing against long-time rivals.”
There was some thought that the Big East’s presidents might vote for UConn’s return to the league at their annual meeting in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. in the summer of 2018. It didn’t happen, but over the ensuing months, particularly the following winter, talks rekindled and things started to take off. The decision-making was done among the Big East presidents; basketball coaches in the league were almost entirely in the dark.
Over the final few months, negotiations went “pretty smoothly,” according to Herbst. By June, 2019, it was essentially a done deal. Thanks to Terry Lyons’ travel itinerary from the NBA Draft to Cromwell, it soon became public.
‘IT’S A WIN-WIN’
“There was no one source or one person,” Lyons said of his scoop. “What I can say, it wasn’t Big East people. Most people think it was the Big East, but it was not. It was around the edges, that’s all I’ll say.”
Lyons’ big scoop was short on details, like what would happen with football? The program would go independent, and though that seemed risky, Benedict has done some impressive scheduling for the program for the next several years.
Still, this move was essentially about one sport.
“I don’t think anybody would disagree that this is primarily a men’s basketball move,” Auriemma acknowledged, “because it’s so important for our men’s basketball program and how crucial its success is to our university. That ends up benefiting everybody else in the athletic department.”
For Auriemma, it means leaving a league where, privately, even AAC officials admit to being disappointed no other program could step up and be competitive (the UConn women never lost a league game in their seven seasons in the AAC, though Auriemma rightly points out that in four of those seasons, the Huskies would have gone undefeated in league in the country).
And UConn women’s games — about 16-18 per year — will remain on SNY.
Of course, the Big East didn’t UConn back. The league was doing just fine as a 10-team unit. Villanova won a pair of national titles, the league earned numerous NCAA tournament bids per year and consistently ranked as one of the best in the country, its championship tournament at Madison Square Garden routinely selling out.
“We could have stayed pat,” PC’s Driscoll pointed out, “but we want to be the best basketball conference in the nation.”
If any school may have earned reservations about the UConn men returning to the Big East, it’s Providence. At Big East Media Day last October, PC coach Ed Cooley said he felt the league “gave Connecticut new life, gave their fan base new life,” and criticized UConn for chasing football dollars the past seven years, adding, “Shame on (UConn) for making that decision upfront.”
Cooley reckoned Hurley and his staff will become even more of a recruiting force on the East Coast and, indeed, the Huskies have already reeled in a pair of prime 2020 New York/New Jersey recruits in Andre Jackson and Adama Sanogo — the latter snatched right from Seton Hall’s grasp.
“It’ll make it tougher, because now we’ve got a real competitor in the Northeast again,” Driscoll conceded. “But I’m OK with that. I think it really helps the Big East brand. Our brand has been phenomenal, probably better than anyone thought when we reconvened. But bringing UConn back only adds to that national cache. I think it’s a win-win.”
Understandably, the move comes with initial costs to UConn. There is a $3.5 million entry fee (potentially as much as a third of the Big East’s asking price a few years earlier) as well as a $17 million exit fee from the American. UConn’s first two “down payments” toward that fee come from the AAC withholding the program’s year-end, conference-related distributions from 2018-19 and 2019-20 (the latter of which won’t be known until June). UConn will then pay about $1 million a year until the balance is paid off.
Then there’s the $30 million exit fee UConn must pay if it leaves the Big East — a number that gradually decreases after six years.
“We didn’t join the Big East to leave,” Benedict pointed out. “They didn’t bring us in to leave, and we didn’t join to leave.”