The Big East Conference was left in tact following the latest round of conference expansion earlier this summer. Conference officials were allowed to breath a sigh of relief for at least the near future. Now those league officials want to focus on growing the league and increasing the exposure of member teams to ultimately make the league stronger and lessen the possibility of future raids.
"We’ve talked about it for it seems forever," Marinatto said referring to the possibility of additional expansion of the football conference to nine teams or beyond. "I think nine presents a lot of opportunity, beginning with a balanced schedule, plus certainly another marketplace. We’ve always said we would consider bringing in a ninth school if it brought value to the membership."
Earlier this summer when it looked like the Big-12 was breaking apart, the Big East seemed poised to scoop up the leftovers. Bringing in Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri and Iowa State would have created a 12 team football conference while enhancing the best basketball conference in college sports history. That, of course, didn’t happen but the consensus among coaches is that the league needs to add at least one school.
The most likely scenario would be for current member Villanova to make a jump to the Division 1-A level similar to what Connecticut did in 2002. But a large hurdle for the Wildcats to overcome would be the size of 13,500 seat Villanova Stadium. UConn had the built in advantage of moving into 40,000 seat Rentschler Field shortly after the move up in classification.
Even without expansion, the Big East Conference has most of the coveted Northeast market cornered.
"We need to focus on our assets," Marinatto said to reporters covering media day Tuesday. "A fourth of the population lives in this part of the country. From a standpoint of assets, we have much more potential (then other conferences) because we represent more of the population than anyone else."
The Big East is currently locked into television agreements with ESPN, ABC and CBS that run four more seasons in football and three in basketball. The next window to begin negotiating new deals comes up in September of 2012.
The SEC and ACC have both recently signed landmark television deals with ESPN. The ACC deal will pay out a total of 1.86 billion dollars over 12 years. The SEC deal is worth 205 million dollars per season over a 15 year span.
Then there is the possibility of following the path of the Big-10 by creating a television network. Marinatto said the influence of former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue will play a key role in what the league does with future television rights.
"He has an incredible understanding of television, technology and innovation," Marinatto said of Tagliabue. "The people in those industries have incredible respect for him. He created the NFL Network. He knows what it takes in order to take that kind of step moving forward.
"The job we do with our television rights may be the most important thing we tackle in the next ten years," Marinatto concluded.