{"id":25620,"date":"2010-12-01T12:01:45","date_gmt":"2010-12-01T17:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=25620"},"modified":"2010-12-08T10:10:53","modified_gmt":"2010-12-08T15:10:53","slug":"uconn-coaches-welcome-big-east-expansion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/12\/uconn-coaches-welcome-big-east-expansion\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Coaches Welcome Big East Expansion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"<p>Big<\/a>UConn coaches welcomed the news on Monday that Texas Christian University will join the Big East Conference as the 17th<\/sup> member of the NCAA\u2019s largest Division 1-A athletic conference, beginning with the 2012-2013 season.<\/p>\n

The addition of TCU, currently ranked no. 3 in the Bowl Championship Series football rankings, continues the evolution of the Big East. Since it began in 1979 with six universities, including the University of Connecticut, it has developed into a national conference with 24 sports that geographically reaches nine of the nation\u2019s top 35 television markets. The Big East has won 28 national championships in six different sports, and 128 student-athletes have won individual national titles.<\/p>\n

TCU, located in Fort Worth, Texas, will bring the Big East into the Dallas\/Fort Worth market, which is the fifth largest in the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe addition of TCU ensures that the Big East will continue to remain one of the nation\u2019s premier athletic conferences well into the future,\u201d said John I. Jenkins, president of Notre Dame and chairman of the conference\u2019s CEO executive committee. \u201cWith TCU, the Big East adds an excellent academic institution that combines outstanding athletic achievement with a commitment to NCAA compliance and the educational success of its student-athletes.\u201d<\/p>\n

UConn coaches say they are looking forward to welcoming TCU into the Big East and competing against another quality opponent on the field.<\/p>\n

Huskies head football coach Randy Edsall said he\u2019s excited about the move. \u201cI think it strengthens us from a football end and probably strengthens us from an overall sports situation,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom my perspective as a football coach, you\u2019re getting a tremendous football program coming into the conference. As I said to Gary [Patterson, TCU head football coach], to me from top to bottom there\u2019s not going to be a conference that\u2019s better than what the Big East is going to be in football.\u201d<\/p>\n

Geno Auriemma, head coach of UConn\u2019s No. 1-ranked women\u2019s basketball team, said he\u2019s aware of how good the TCU football program is, and the women\u2019s basketball team has consistently been a top-25 program. \u201cI think it adds a lot to our conference,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom a women\u2019s basketball standpoint, it\u2019s made our league \u2013 which is arguably the toughest league in the country \u2013 even tougher. We are bringing in another NCAA Tournament caliber team to our conference. That\u2019s another tough road game, and I think it strengthens and expands the top of our league. And maybe, now that we are going down to Texas every other a year, a Texas kid thinks \u2018hey, maybe I\u2019d like to play in the Big East.\u2019 The college athletics world is changing, and this is another example.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jim Calhoun, Huskies\u2019 head men\u2019s basketball coach, said adding more teams to the conference will likely result in some reconfiguring of the Big East regular season basketball schedule, which already has a limited home-and-home conference schedule because there are so many league teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just think it\u2019ll make two more conferences, eventually. That\u2019s my gut feeling,\u201d said Calhoun, whose team is ranked No. 7 in the nation this week. \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019ll have just one [additional football team]. I think 18 will be the number.\u201d<\/p>\n

TCU, known as the Horned Frogs, competes in 20 intercollegiate sports and has produced nationally-ranked programs in football, baseball, men\u2019s golf, women\u2019s golf, rifle, and equestrian.<\/p>\n

Individually, 51 Horned Frog student-athletes earned all-America honors. The TCU football squad finished the 2010 regular season with a 12-0 record. A year ago, the football team played in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. The baseball team played in the 2010 College World Series.<\/p>\n

Additionally, the women\u2019s basketball team was the regular-season conference champion. The men\u2019s and women\u2019s tennis teams were conference tournament champions. The men\u2019s swimming team captured a regular-season league crown. The women\u2019s volleyball team participated in the NCAA Championship.<\/p>\n

TCU has an enrollment of 9,142, including 7,853 undergraduates, making it comparable in size to most of the private institutions that are members of the Big East, such as Providence College, Seton Hall, Villanova, and Marquette.<\/p>\n

The addition of a TCU as a football member of the Big East is the latest evolution of Big East realignment, which began in 2005, after three football member schools \u2013 Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College \u2013 left for the Atlantic Coast Conference. Five new football members were added: University of Cincinnati, DePaul University, University of Louisville, Marquette University, and the University of South Florida. The Big East has an automatic bid to one of the prestigious BCS post-season bowl games. Villanova, which joined the Big East in 1982 but competes at the Division I Football Championship Series level, is considering a move up to the BCS level of football competition, which would bring that sport in line with its other team competition.<\/p>\n

“I realize that some people will question geography,” Big East commissioner John Marinatto told ESPN.com. “Paul Tagliabue, the former commissioner of the NFL and one of our consultants, put it best when he said at a recent meeting, ‘The Dallas Cowboys play in the NFC East. TCU and their fans will be right at home in the Big East.’ I couldn’t agree more.”<\/p>\n

During his weekly news conference on Tuesday, Edsall responded to critics of the Big East expansion: \u201cEverybody always wants to look at the negative. That\u2019s ridiculous. It\u2019s ludicrous,\u201d he said. \u201cTo me, what you try to do is make your conference as strong as you can. The Big East went out and just made a move that makes the conference stronger, most especially from a football standpoint and from a total sports standpoint. Bottom line is the quality institution you\u2019re getting in, and the quality program which TCU has is, to me, significant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As TCU joins the Big East, the Huskies look forward to competing against another quality opponent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[55],"class_list":["post-25620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-30 15:09:46","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25620"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26085,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25620\/revisions\/26085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25620"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=25620"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=25620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}