That was good enough for the program's first No. The following year, the Wildcats would finish the season with a record of 25-4 including a 14-2 record in the Big East regular season. In just his fourth year with the team, Wright led the Wildcats to an unlikely Sweet 16 berth duel to the emergence of guards Randy Foye and Allan Ray. Villanova head coach Jay Wright has been at the helm of the program since 2001 and it did not take him long to establish a competitive and successful program. With teams like Pittsburgh and West Virginia losing their ‘Backyard Brawl’ game and the long, storied rivalry of Syracuse and Georgetown essentially evaporating, teams would no longer have a major game to look forward to. Notre Dame fled to the ACC, while Louisville and Rutgers landed in the American before spinning off to the ACC and Big Ten. Once the major chips had fallen there was no stopping the other top conference teams from jumping ship themselves. After Pittsburgh and Syracuse left, West Virginia followed suit by joining the Big 12. This created a domino effect that left the Big East in peril. Longtime Big East members Pittsburgh and Syracuse would decide to abandon their conference for the ACC. On September 18th, 2011, the ACC would make an announcement that would completely alter the landscape of college basketball. Since then, the Big East trails only the Atlantic Coast Conference in titles, but the two conference’s paths to success could not be further apart. Before long, the conference would crown its first national champion in Georgetown, who did so by defeating Houston in the 1984 National Championship. Gavitt did so with ambitions of assembling a northeastern basketball-centric athletic conference. In 1979, Providence College head coach Dave Gavitt formed the Big East Conference. A 2014 ESPN documentary titled ‘Requiem For The Big East’ detailed the meteoric ascension and subsequent downfall of a conference that was once the most successful college sports league in America.ĭespite being left for dead, the Big East Conference prevailed and is once again on the rise to becoming the premier conference in all of college basketball. Since the reformatting of the Big East Conference in 2013, the Wildcats have been dominant in a time when the conference needed them the most. Are the Villanova Wildcats the team of the Big East?
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