STORS, Connecticut — Rick Pitino is once again calling for changes to Big East and expanding to the Super Basketball Conference.
In an interview with legendary former Duke coach Mike Kruzhezewski, Pitino repeatedly reiterated his attitude that the league needs to act.
A month ago, Coach K proposed that the ACC and the Big East merged to form one major league, bringing in meetings like the Big 12, SEC and Big Ten.
Pitino agreed to Krzyzewski and the two raised it again on Friday.
“I'm trying to get it [the Big East on board]and obviously, I jumped on your bandwagon with suggestions about combining with the ACC. uconn. “And you'll get up to 18 teams, 16 teams. The Eleven isn't enough. And now it's a bit like the ACC, but the big Eastern teams of the past, which were winning eight or nine teams in the NCAA tournament. It's not typical. So if you don't expand, the boat will be missing out.”
It should be noted that Big East's current iteration will have a new six-year media rights deal with Fox, NBC and TNT Sports average nearly $80 million a year last summer.
Improvements to current trading with FOX and CBS, which expire at the end of this season.
This was an average annual contract of $41.67 million.
However, it is not comparable to other power conferences.
For example, the SEC has a deal with Disney and ESPN, which pays $300 million a year.
The Big Ten media rights deal totals $7 billion over seven years.
Pitino also suggests adding schools such as Dayton in the Atlantic 10, St. Louis, and Memphis in the AAC.
Now it will reduce the amount each school will pull from current television deals.
“Now, the president, president of the president, and perhaps mine, are very knowledgeable basketball fans, they think about money, they think about revenue,” Pitino said. “And that's like a company like Uber starting up and they're losing $500 million a year, but they understand that they'll make 10 years in 10 years. We're You can't see that. If you form a Super League, you don't know that you have a lot of money to go down the road.”
“I think the coaches are in favor of the Super League,” he added. “And I think the president is against that.”
There are complications regarding the potential ACC-BIG East complications.
Big East is currently on 11 teams, and the ACC has 18 teams. Meetings of 29 teams are not feasible.
But there is clearly a lot of appeal to the conference led by Duke, North Carolina, Connecticut, Marquette and Villanova.
The league sent just eight teams to the NCAA Tournament a combined year ago, and may not top that number this March.
Such an alliance also gives home to UConn's football team.
The Husky have been cheating on taking part in the Big 12 multiple times in recent years, but the president of the conference refused to add them.
