Syracuse, NY
Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim misses the old Big East Conference and is not all that happy about leaving the new one.
Syracuse and Pittsburgh are set to leave the Big East Conference after the Atlantic Coast Conference announced Sunday that its council of presidents had unanimously voted to accept the two schools.
Now the ACC has 14 schools while the Big East is reeling from the shockwaves after losing two of its top programs.
Boeheim doesn't seem overly thrilled with the move but is still ready to move on with a decision that appears to be in the best interest of the school.
"If we were leaving the old Big East, I'd probably be upset," Boeheim said Tuesday in an interview on Syracuse radio station WSKO. "But what we have now in the Big East isn't what we used to have. It's completely different. Am I still sad about it? Yeah. I mean, 30 some years in a league, you bet."
Syracuse was a charter member of the Big East, which was founded as a basketball conference in 1979.
"I think you have to understand two things," Boeheim said. "Basketball is my concern. Are we going to a great place to play basketball? Yes. How you get there, I don't think that matters. We're going to a great basketball conference."
And who can argue with that. While Syracuse will miss games with rivals Georgetown, St. John's and Villanova among others it will still have tough matchups with Pitt along with new rivals Duke, Maryland and North Carolina.
"We're leaving a 17-team Big East Conference that's going to include a team from Texas, Florida, Chicago, Wisconsin, Kentucky. We're not leaving what we founded. We're leaving something completely different," Boeheim said. "Obviously, it was unstable, and a couple of people criticizing this are people that could have saved the Big East.
"If Notre Dame wanted to save the Big East, they could have joined in 2004 and we wouldn't be having these discussions today."
Twitter: @ihavenet
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