Rick Pitino says UConn will ‘keep trying to move to another conference,’ would ‘love’ Notre Dame in Big East

NEW YORK - Rick Pitino has his eyes on the long-term success of the Big East Conference, and has long advocated for the league to expand and potentially merge with the ACC.

The Naismith Hall of Fame coach said Thursday he believes UConn will “keep trying to move to another conference” and he would “love” for Notre Dame to join the Big East.

Notre Dame, of course, has made headlines in recent days after its football team was excluded from the College Football Playoff, and its AD, Pete Bevacqua, then slammed the ACC for its perceived role in the snub.

“I think Notre Dame, if they were to do something, they’d be more likely to join the ACC in football than they would [the Big East],” Pitino said Thursday in response to a question from NJ Advance Media. “We would love to have them back [in the Big East] with basketball.”

Notre Dame was a member of the Big East from 1995 until 2013. The school is now full member of the ACC in all sports except football and men’s hockey; for football, they remain an independent, but have a special agreement to play multiple ACC teams annually.

The Big East, of course, does not have football so if Notre Dame were to somehow come back, they would have to fill out their schedule without any league teams.

“I’m a very proactive person,” Pitino said. “I’m always thinking ahead... I’m thinking if UConn’s going to keep football, they’re going to keep trying to make a move to another conference. Well, they are the engine that drives this league. So you better have three or four teams to make up for that one UConn in my estimation. And I always think ahead, and I think expansion is good.

“Remember, the Presidents look at it as, ‘We don’t want to cut the pie.’ And times are tough in Catholic schools economically. Well, I’m more of the Amazon thinking that Amazon lost money for the first 20 years, that in order to make money, you have to invest so the Presidents don’t agree with me in this league.”

UConn has, in fact, been linked to the Big 12 and ACC for years, and there have been constant rumblings that they could eventually leave the Big East. Again.

Pitino recently argued in favor of Atlantic 10 power Dayton as an expansion target to bolster the Big East, but says he’d “love” to get Notre Dame back, along with several other former Big East schools.

“I’d love to see Notre Dame here,” he said. “...I’m a big Notre Dame fan. My son went to school there. But if they don’t want this to happen again [getting excluded from the CFP], they better get themselves in a conference because it’s going to happen again to them if they’re if they’re two losses without an affiliation.

“And the AD, who’s taken a lot of criticism, is an incredible guy. I know him, I’ve met him on six or seven different occasions. He’s a great guy, great guy, and but unless they get themselves in a league, they’re gonna be faced with this problem again. So the Big East is, we would love to have Notre Dame basketball back in the Big East as well as Syracuse and Louisville and the rest of them. We’d love to have them as well.”

Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman told NJ Advance Media last year that the league had no plans to expand at the moment and, if it did, it would be seeking “big brands.”

Notre Dame certainly fits that bill.

“I think you need big brands,” she said then. “Brands big enough to command the absence of dilution with your network partner and that’s what we got with UConn. UConn joined the league and FOX paid pro rata, they paid as much as all the other schools were getting so none of our other schools had to go backward and get a diluted share because UConn was joining.

“So that’s an important consideration for our schools is how much are they adding on all those fronts and is it going to help us financially? We’ve been approached by a lot of schools to come in, we haven’t seen fit to bring anybody other than UConn. Are we monitoring it? Yes. Could their be opportunities re-actively in the future? Maybe. If something happens to a league like what happened to the Pac-12, who knows?”

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