What Might Have Been

March 10, 2009 at 9:18 am 3 comments

Penn State’s move to the Big Ten in the early 1990s had a huge impact on college athletics, helping end the era of major-college independents and predicting the conference consolidation that followed. But what if the Nittany Lions had made a different move a decade earlier? That’s one of the questions posed today in a New York Times Q&A with Mike Tranghese, long-time commissioner of the Big East Conference. If you follow college sports at all, the whole thing is worth a read, but one exchange is especially noteworthy:

big_east_logo220x180

penn_state_logoQ: …do you ever look back and wonder what would have happened if Penn State had come aboard?

A: I look back on 30 years, and I think we made one major mistake. We had a chance to take Penn State in 1982 and we didn’t. You look back on it and the whole face of college athletics would be changed now … in 1982, I was just a young staffer at this meeting. Dave [Gavitt, then Big East commissioner] wanted to go to Penn State and extend the invitation. But he couldn’t if we didn’t have the votes. We had eight teams and needed six votes and it was a 5-3 vote … At the end of our meeting, Dave asked what I thought. I said, ‘We will rue the day over this decision.’ And it’s been pretty prophetic.

Compelling stuff.

Ryan Jones, senior editor

Entry filed under: Joe Paterno, Penn State football. Tags: , , , , .

Billy Price Goes Black-Tie More on Paterno vs. Bowden

3 Comments Add your own

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Trackback this post  |  Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed




Subscribe
      via RSS
      by email

Recent Posts

Sites We Like

   Penn State Alumni Association
   OnwardState—a student-run blog
   Citizen Mom—Amy Zurzola Quinn ’94
   Penn State Press
   Steve McCurry's Blog—Steve McCurry ’74
   Good is Dead—Chip Kidd ’86
   Today in the Sky—Ben Mutzabaugh ’97
   Seldom Scene—local photographer Nick Sloff ’92
   Homegrown Happy Valley—Michele Marchetti ’95
   Blunt Force Mama—Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02g

Bloggers

Tina Hay
Posts | Bio
Ryan Jones
Posts | Bio
Jessie Knuth
Posts | Bio
Barbara Marshall
Posts | Bio
Mary Murphy
Posts | Bio
Julie Nelson
Posts | Bio
Carole Otypka
Posts | Bio
Lori Shontz
Posts | Bio

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,822 other followers