When school athletes begin to play next August, it will be the beginning of a new chapter for Marquette University athletics.
The move to the Big East Conference is good for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the conference championships are held in Madison Square Garden every year. This means a trip to New York and a better incentive than, say, playing in St. Louis or Cincinnati. What even slightly athletic kid doesn't dream of making the clutch, last-minute shot in a sold-out Madison Square Garden?
Second, the Big East television market, when adjusted to include the new markets Marquette, Cincinnati, South Florida, Louisville and DePaul will bring in, includes almost one quarter of all television households in the United States.
The implications of wider exposure for recruitment, publicity, enrollment, and just about every aspect of college life, both athletic and non-athletic, are impressive. Marquette will be able to make a serious bid for membership in the top Catholic universities in the country after a few years of exposure.
Which brings us to the (slight) downside of moving to the Big East; we won't be the top dogs anymore. While some students have been seemingly struck starry-eyed by a recent appearance in the NCAA Final Four, it might behoove the student body to adjust its expectations to meet the new challenges. Of the NCAA Division I sports Marquette fields, perhaps only the men's golf team will be able to stake a claim to greatness right off the bat.
The reasons we are urging a seeming backstab to team spirit and the Marquette community is not because we have anything less than perfect faith in the ability of the teams in question to compete.
It's a matter of sheer logistics.
Travel schedules will alter, as will the climatology of the games in question. Coaches will have to adjust strategies and tactics to meet these new challenges, new atmospheres and new arenas.
While we still believe the old tape reel will come in handy for a lot of the sports in question, there is a big difference between watching an opposing coach's strategy on screen and then qualitatively meeting it on the court.
Until this important barrier is broken, all the tape reel time in the world won't help coaches adjust to the new landscape of Big East play.
Additionally, while Marquette will be a newcomer to the big-time publicity of the Big East, the future Marquette athletes will be facing teams who have been exposed to these atmospheres for a long time.
This means we won't only be taking on Villanova or Notre Dame in basketball or Rutgers in soccer, for example, but also the extensive resources each team has accumulated after years of massive public exposure.
We offer this recommendation not to discourage attendance at basketball games (as if anything we said could possibly alter that) but rather to prepare students for their potential disappointments — as well as hard-fought underdog victories — in the transition to becoming one of the top dogs.
This editorial appeared in The Marquette Tribune on May 2 2005.