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To call Tuesday’s first-round National Invitation Tournament game between West Virginia and Georgetown a “family reunion” wouldn’t be completely accurate.
I mean, Mountaineers and … Hoyas. What are Hoyas, anyway? Well, their mascot is a bulldog. But I don’t think a growling canine and a musket-wielding, bearded man are cut from the same cloth.
Their schools are, though. Georgetown was a founding member of the Big East Conference in 1979. West Virginia joined in 1991 and began playing football in the league in 1995.
It wasn’t much of a gathering for old times sake in McDonough Arena earlier this week. First of all, the Mountaineers never played there. Neither had the Hoyas, at least since 2009.
In the 2,000 seat gymnasium on the Washington, D.C. campus, Georgetown waxed WVU, 77-65, finishing the Mountaineers’ season with a 17-16 record.
That wasn’t like old times, either.
West Virginia entered the contest with a five-game winning streak (though only two current players were a part of only one game) against the Hoyas.
But that was ended.
Just like the relationship between these two old rivals.
And it’s a shame.
The landscape of college athletics was altered drastically in 2003 when Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College bolted the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Supposedly, it blindsided then-Commissioner Mike Tranghese. Yet, turmoil was building within this conference for well over a decade.
The recent ESPN “30-for-30” documentary, “Requiem for the Big East” detailed the construction, expansion and eventual destruction of the league very well.
Though, in my opinion, it should have just been called “The Georgetown and Syracuse Happy Hour” because the main focus was on those two schools and their basketball dominance for much of the 1980s.
Fair enough. They’ve combined for 54 NCAA tournament appearances as members of the Big East, as well as 15 conference tournament crowns, 10 Final Four appearances and two national championship titles.
In the 1980s, both schools helped revitalize college basketball in the northeast and the “30-for-30” documentary made clear to drive that fact home. Frankly, it presented it beautifully.
Even the supporting cast of the Big East played a large part in improving basketball’s image in northeastern urban areas. St. John’s made the Final Four in 1985, Seton Hall was the runner up that same year, and Villanova won it all during the time when Wham! was on top of the charts and Marty McFly claimed to be Calvin Klein.
The Big East was the prominent conference of that time and the lap of luxury; the players and coaches knew it.
Especially the coaches.
“I want my kids to graduate but I want to be rich,” Hoyas coach John Thompson told “Requiem for the Big East” director Ezra Edleman. “People listen to rich folks. They pray for poor folks.”
Those were the conference’s glory days. Less than a decade later, that same mentality was, according to some, the source of the league’s demise.
Adding football caused a rift among many athletic directors of the Big East.
Adding West Virginia University didn’t help, either, according to one executive at the time.
“I didn’t sign up for the Big East to play in Morgantown, W.Va,” Providence Journal reporter Bill Reynolds recalled a coach telling him.
Declining Penn State admittance in 1982 probably could have been a tell-tale sign of the conference’s demise, early on.
Tranghese was on record saying the Big East would “rue the day” of leaving out the Nittany Lions.
They’ve been in a better place, though, a more proper place in the Big Ten. Pitt, along with Syracuse, left for the Atlantic Coast Conference and it is proving to be a good fit for those institutions, too.
After carrying the Big East banner, WVU is isolated in the Big 12.
There’s no other way to put it.
But, somehow, it is the best fit for the Mountaineers.
After the exodus of the Panthers and Orange in 2011, something had to be done – it was every man for himself. West Virginia took its best opportunity, quickly, to land a new home for the foreseeable future.
Wait, and the Mountaineers are likely to be cast aside among the likes of the second-tier American Athletic Conference.
They’re lucky to be in the Big 12 with fellow members who share the same mentality on athletics, academics, how to form a fanbase and how to operate as a state’s flagship institution.
Traveling thousands of miles to play conference “rivals” in a different time zone isn’t ideal; it’s nearly insane.
Ideally, teams in the same region would stick together as part of the same identity in the same conference.
But with Ohio State (and Penn State), West Virginia and Pittsburgh being so close and playing in three different conferences – that’s far from ideal. It, too, is insane. Playing the teams like Georgetown, Villanova, Rutgers and Pitt made for natural rivalries, as well as easy road trips for away games for any fan.
They were good times. Now, they are the real times.
Teams like Iowa State, Baylor and Oklahoma aren’t WVU’s rivals, yet; nor are they family.
Apparently, Georgetown and the rest of the Big East weren’t kin, either.
(Peaslee, a Youngstown native, is a sports writer for the Herald-Star and Weirton Daily Times. He can be contacted at mpeaslee@heraldstaronline.com and followed on Twitter at @thempeas)