Anyone who has followed college sports and conference realignment in recent years knows that what would’ve once read like a Mad Lib is now ordinary. Stanford and Cal in the ACC. USC and UCLA in the Big Ten. You get the idea.
So perhaps talk about two (predominantly) East Coast conferences merging isn’t a crazy thought in the year 2025. And that’s exactly what’s been floated by two giants in college basketball: former Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski and current St. John’s head coach Rick Pitino.
Last month, Coach K took to his radio show to suggest that the ACC and Big East should merge into one basketball superconference. Just a few weeks later, on the same show, Pitino concurred with Krzyzewski saying the Big East “need[s] to do something” to compete with the power conferences.
The Big East is especially reliant on men’s basketball to generate revenue as the conference doesn’t sponsor football.
Appearing on John Ourand’s The Varsity podcast, Big East commissioner Val Ackerman spoke about a possible merger with the ACC, suggesting that in this new era of college athletics you have to be open to anything.
“When you’ve got two Hall of Famers opining about, not only the history of college basketball but the future of college basketball, you have to listen,” Ackerman said of Krzyzewski and Pitino’s comments. “I take very seriously any idea around the future of college basketball, what it means for the Big East, what the Big East should be doing. I’m not sure I can opine right now what that sort of combination would look like. But we’ve got some related ideas that we’re hatching here about alliances, about who we should be working with as we look to secure, not only the future of the Big East, but the future of college basketball.
“I have great relationships with other commissioners, great respect for [ACC commissioner] Jim Phillips in particular,” Ackerman continued. “I would say, I can’t really comment on it, but there’s been some conversations about what we could all be doing together, again, not only to secure our own futures, but to make sure that college basketball stays strong and relevant as football interests continue to dominate much of the headlines and much of the bandwidth of the leagues that we consider peer conferences.”
Without revealing any details, Ackerman acknowledged that the Big East is looking at potential partnerships with other leagues to increase its relevance in basketball.
From a performance standpoint, the Big East is on par with what any other power conference has done in the sport in recent years. They also have the brands to drive value (i.e. UConn, St. John’s, Villanova, Georgetown, Marquette, Xavier, etc.).
And if we’ve learned anything from recent iterations of conference realignment, creating more opportunities for the sport’s best brands to compete against one another is what moves the needle from a media rights perspective. So if the ACC and Big East can sell ESPN, Fox, et al, on more games between Duke and UConn, then it’d be silly for the conferences to not entertain some sort of partnership.
Whether an eventual relationship could take the form of a full-on merger seems far away. But at the very least, discussions are being had. And it certainly seems like there’s room for something mutually beneficial to happen if the two conferences can hammer out the details.
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