Television Killed the Basketball Star

Just after the stroke of midnight on August 1, 1981, a new music channel was born:  MTV.  And prophetically, the first music video to be shown was appropriately “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. Music videos and advanced technology was expected to hurt the radio industry, and while there have been many changes, radio still exists today. Though not quite like it used to be.

My seats for the Syracuse-Pitt Big East tourney game at MSG. 

Why would I bring that up?  It was about that time that the Big East Conference, a new seven-school league based out the Northeast was starting to gain traction.  Thanks in large part to the birth of another new fledgling channel: ESPN.

The television deal gave the Big East the springboard it needed to become one of the most powerful conferences in the country in basketball. Conference teams were playing on national tv and the more ESPN grew and the more households the cable company entered, the Big East grew as well.

The excellent 30-for-30 documentary “Requiem for the Big East”, on ESPN of course, took the viewers through a wonderful journey, from the conference’s founding in the back office of a Providence advertising company, to the move of its members from on-campus gyms to NBA arenas, including vision of moving its conference tournament to Madison Square Garden in New York, to 1985 when three of the four Final Four teams were Big East members.  

The league continued to thrive, with additions of new teams, national titles, but times were changing and the one big elephant in the room was football. While ratings and fan interest in big-time basketball huge, football, is in another atmosphere all together.

Consider that a Friday night, non-conference football game in September between Marshall and West Virginia drew higher ratings than a Syracuse - Louisville basketball game later in March, pretty much sums it up.

The Big East saw the potential and dollar figures that having football would bring in terms of maintaining itself as a power conference along the likes of the Big 10, ACC, SEC and Big 12. But internally, the marriage was struggling. Big East schools with football programs: Boston College, Syracuse, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh, and Miami, were not interested in sharing revenue with the schools that did not play football: Providence, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Marquette, DePaul, Creighton, Xavier, and Georgetown and Villanova (who play football a level lower).

The football schools would eventually depart for conferences to align themselves with bigger football programs and television contracts.  So a league built on television, eventually was torn apart by the very same technology more than 30 years later.

The Big East still exists, despite what many media members want to believe. Going back to its roots with a basketball focus and a new television partnership with the fledgling Fox Sports 1.  

There’s nothing wrong with that. It was inevitable. There’s no going back to the “Good ‘Ol Days.”  As Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, who was excellent in the documentary with great insight and reflection of the history of the Big East, accurately put it, “those days are long gone.”

Did video kill the radio star?  No, not really. Radio still exists and while it is certainly different than a few decades ago, it’s finding its legs in today’s world, just as the Big East is doing today.