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Message: [QUOTE="longtimefan, post: 1460150, member: 212"] Good effort finding that stuff. I was a bit twisted around about some of the details. But I do have a different interpretation of some of the facts. After WVa and Rutty were added, all of the leaders, esp. Tranghese and Harrington, said the BE was done with expansion. And a twelve-team. evenly-balanced (FB-BB) league looked like the perfect set up. Yet, four months later, here comes ND. Why did this happen? Here's St John's (the deciding vote) position after the first expansion: "St. John's did not support the proposal to expand to 14 because of the imbalance favoring football and the logistical problems a basketball league of that size would have created." Which is half true: They (and the other BB's) didn't want an imbalance favoring the FB's. But they sure found no problems with the logistics of a 13 (!) team conference. And, the 3 newbies (WVa, RU and ND) all began playing BE hoops at the same time. All of which leads me to believe that taking ND was part of a grand plan from the first meetings. I would bet that the FB's went along with the 13-team plan because Tranghese convinced them that he could get more out of ND football than the Irish were ever going to give. It might have been better for the FB's to split at that time, rather than inviting ND into the the volatile situation that was the Big East Conference. As a PS to this whole thing--notice that ND had not been to the NCAA tournament since 1990, which means 4 years and counting when they were taken into the BE. They were headed towards irrelevance ala DePaul. The BE saved their hoops program. And, if the deal had not been struck and the FB's went their own way, what would have happened to UConn's still wobbly basketball program? [/QUOTE]

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