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Message: [QUOTE="Townie72, post: 282005, member: 780"] So your answer is "Different agendas"? But as to what that agenda might have been no one has a clue? Sounds pretty empty to me. Seriously, Bob, with no disrespect --- I think this is a red herring. The football schools on their own would have been worse off. There was no alternative agenda that was implementable. I can imagine that if you weren't around in the 1980's and paying a lot of attention to this that not joining PSU in the "sort of" All Sports Conference that Penn State wanted seems like a huge tactical mistake. But at the time that was a deal that almost everyone would have passed on. It stunk to high heaven. First of all it would have required the scrapping of the Big East basketball conference that was just taking off. And by "taking off", I mean it was exploding. And nobody had even guessed just how successful it would be. Until that time SU basketball had a hard time getting a regional game on TV. It was small time --- a sports non-entity. Our rivals --- if you can call them that --- were St Bona and Niagara and Canisius. Suddenly SU was playing on a national stage. I got off an airplane in LA in the early 1980's and saw a kid with an SU basketball shirt on. I had never seen any SU gear previously any further away from Syracuse than Binghamton. Secondly, the deal Paterno and Penn State were offering was highly weighted in their favor. All the basketball revenue --- of which PSU had almost none --- was to be shared. Penn State was going to keep all their football money. It was a "We'll share your half but not my half" arrangement. Paterno was at the time a ruthless SOB. That conference would have been like the USSR with Penn State playing the role of Russia and SU and the others playing Estonia and Lithuania. So the wizards on here that say that there was some sort of strategic failing on the Big East not to take the PSU deal just weren't there at the time. [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?