Requiem for the Big East

There's always a strange dissonance one experiences whenever he or she witnesses New Yorkers either pretending to be the underdog, or somehow deluded into believing that they actually are the underdog. They have the world at their feet in a city that has everything and rules everyone. How can they be an underdog? That's the feeling everyone outside of the Northeast will feel as they watch this very slanted, very prejudice-laden documentary.

"Requiem for the Big East" isn't so much a requiem as a melancholy anthem for such self-delusion.

Here's the back story: American college sports have always been divided by regional conferences that promoted their teams and encouraged exciting rivalries. The Midwest has the Big 10, the Atlantic Coast states have the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Mid and Deep South has the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Pacific Coast states have the Pac 10, just to name the four conferences with which this documentary is preoccupied.

However, despite a plethora of prominent schools, the Northeast had no storied conference unifying their college teams. Step in Dave Gavitt, basketball coach and athletic director at Providence College in Rhode Island. Through smart strategy, brilliant networking and a lot of chutzpah, he manages to create the Big East conference with his own school and St. John's, Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Connecticut (UConn) and Boston College. A little later they were joined by Pittsburgh (Pitt) and Villanova. Because Gavitt is a basketball coach, and these schools were best at that sport, The Big East starts as a basketball-only conference.

These schools are all located in the power base of the American cities: New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston and Pittsburgh, their suburbs and a few smaller cities not too far away. That these cities always gave/give the cold shoulder to college sports in lieu of their pro teams is never examined as a reason these colleges don't have the legacies of the other conferences and schools, which they so admire. The Northeastern newspapers barely even cover college sports! How can Boston College achieve the notoriety of North Carolina, Michigan, UCLA or Louisiana State when its hometown media are so busy ignoring them for the Boston Celtics NBA team?

As the conference formation is shown in the film, we are plied with the familiar tropes of the Northeast, as people in these wealthy places suddenly find their ethnicity (in this case Italian) and play it for all its worth as an underdog conference that "don't get no respect." Much is made of the fact these coaches and players are all an ethnic mix compared to the rest of American teams, and that would be applause-worthy were it not for the elitist attitude these same coaches and the filmmaker himself exhibit later in the movie when the conference adds other college programs.

It is fun to see the early broadcast days of ESPN as it became the de facto sports network for The Big East. While the rest of the Northeastern media are ignoring their teams, ESPN (based in Connecticut) wisely builds on its locality, and fits hand-in-glove with the conference. The quid pro quo of promotion of network and conference are an easy fit, and both rise together.

The part of this film that works is really all the film should have been about to begin with, which was the Syracuse-Georgetown rivalry. The coaches of these two teams seemed to live to humiliate the other's school, especially in conference games. Their commentary is colorful and witty and had this film been only an hour long (as it should have been) they would have boosted the quality of the project infinitely.

Unfortunately the last third of this film is devoted to what the Big East coaches saw as the devolution of the conference, which is when it had to add other schools for the sake of football's growing influence on budgets. With sneering disdain, the coaches offer that they had to add Miami, West Virginia, and Virginia Tech. These men who sold themselves as the down-to-earth Italian street kids at the doc's beginning, suddenly find their Northeastern haughtiness as they lament having to play in these places they clearly consider to be beneath them.

Even worse, the filmmaker, Ezra Edelman, a Yale graduate, buys into this snobbery and even promotes it. Moments after justifiably explaining the deplorable racism Georgetown player Patrick Ewing experienced, Edelman introduces the induction of West Virginia into the conference with the most offensive and bigoted stereotype one could possibly muster. The banjos of the "Deliverance" theme play as rural man (playing a hillbilly?) stomp dances on the porch of a shotgun shack! And while he's assassinating the character of other schools for their crime of being outside the Northeast, the director overlooks some embarrassing details in the conference team's histories, like the Boston College game fixing scandal of the 1970s.

It is at this point the entire film loses its thesis and our sympathy. One can't root for the underdog when the underdog is too busy looking down its snout at the rest of us. The coaches who growled about having to play at Miami, West Virginia and Virginia Tech, then growl about the schools leaving the conference for sunnier pastures, and taking Syracuse with them. After watching the last 30 minutes of the film, one can only cheer on the departing schools and enjoy the demise of a conference that formerly held our respect.

This movie is not a waste of your time if you are a college sports fan. If you have the luxury of seeing it on DVR or DVD, you will likely want to fast forward about 15 minutes and end it before the conference expands. It is this core part of the film that was all that was worth exploring.

I will start by saying that I am a '95 grad of UConn so maybe I am biased. But putting together a documentary (in 2014) about the Big East Conference without mentioning anything that happened on the court after Seton Hall made the Final Four in 1990 is ridiculous! Oh wait, he did mention the 2003 Syracuse National Championship. Is Edelman a Syracuse fan by chance?

The conference won 6 National Championships between the start of the conference and 2012. The Georgetown title was highlighted as was the miracle Villanova title. I just mentioned the 2003 Syracuse title. So where were the other 3? They are all won by the Connecticut Huskies! One in 1999,one in 2004 and one in 2011. But if you just watched this, you'd never know it.

Was Miami joining the conference, the beginning of the end? I guess. But the road from Miami joining in 1990 to the eventual loss of Syracuse and Pitt that signaled the end of this run of the Big East contained a lot of great basketball!

I feel like there was an hour of this documentary that got left on the cutting room floor as they jump through the last 20 years in a few minutes by showing schools added and subtracted from a map of the USA.

I still gave this 8 stars because the first 90 minutes of this are spectacular! Even the last 30 minutes contain great material. There is just so much story that goes untold. In the end, this is really a Requiem for the Syracuse-Georgetown rivalry with a little 80's Big East thrown in.

30 for 30: Requiem for the Big East (2014)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Excellent documentary takes a look at the history of the Big East conference and how it pretty much came out of nowhere and for a brief period changed how college basketball was played. Jim Boeheim, Lou Carnesecca, John Thompson, Rick Pitino, Chris Mullin, Patrick Ewing and Ed Pickney are just a few of the famous faces who are interviewed about the rise and eventual fall of the conference.

If you're a college basketball fan then you're going to enjoy going through this documentary, which does a very good job at explaining why the conference was formed and then telling you why it took off like it did. The television contract with ESPN is fully discussed as are other money avenues that the coaches became rich on. The greatest thing going for the documentary is all the footage highlighting why the conference was the biggest and toughest. The various fights and ejections are all rather fun to watch since the sport is now watered down so much. I do wish that the documentary would have explained how this conference changed the structure of the other conferences but that's never really touched up.

This film is about the creation of the Big East in 1979 and how the East Coast went from a relatively weak region in college basketball to the top in the mid-late 1980s to it unraveling by the 2000s to its recreation as a new league with only the original teams. The film is full of interviews, stock footage and the like and it's well made but also its focus is a bit unrealistic. After all, what eventually damaged this conference (with so many teams coming and going) is one of the biggest problems with college sports today. Who would have thought schools like Miami and Boston College would be in the ACC and Maryland would be in the Big 10, for examples?! So, despite the film's talk about traditions and excellence, it all boils down to money and what moves can, at least in the short term, bring schools more money. And the composition of conferences has been changing so quickly, fans cannot possibly keep up with who is in what conference and old rivalries are now disappearing.

Because this is NOT just a Big East problem, I think the film misses the mark. It also misses the mark in a few other ways. I agree with Demarco-2's review where he felt uneasy about the elitism of this particular film. When they talked about the introduction of West Virginia into the Big East, this was accompanied with banjo music and footage that looked almost like it was straight out of "Deliverance"!! This is vulgar and nasty--and shouldn't be tolerated. Additionally, the film misses the mark because the film has such a strong since of nostalgia but by the time the documentary was over, I didn't really care--and I think this is probably going to be the case with many viewers. Overall, interesting and worth seeing but not among the finer films in the ESPN series.