While Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman would not rule out a possible shutdown of the college basketball season yesterday while speaking during the Learfield IMG College Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, she did provide some valuable insight about the strength of her conference and the road ahead in college sports. Below are some highlights from SBJ's conversation with Ackerman.
- On UConn's re-entry to the Big East: "One of our biggest stories in the past year. ... With everything that brought in terms of the rivalries and the history, and of course, great basketball.”
- On UConn’s return partially being a media rights play: “We really think that they strengthened our hand in terms of our competitiveness, the value of Big East programming, the nature of our games, particularly when sort of old Big East schools are playing up against each other, what that could mean in terms of viewer interests.”
- On the Big East's deal with Fox: “We're in year eight of a national deal. We've got tremendous exposure, particularly of men's basketball. Every game on the air in a normal year would be about 192 games on Fox air, including 20 or so on big Fox network. So we've been really happy.”
- On potential NIL legislation: “The things to keep an eye on are the details of the legislation when they get voted on in January. … What role Congress will have ultimately is probably one of the bigger unknowns. ... There was an appeal to Congress to intervene in a modest way to preempt the States and also to create what we hoped would be a safe harbor in the event that the framework is challenged down the road. So that's a big unknown. Maybe we'll know more after the runoff in January where the Senate's going to fall on that.”
