Our buddy Thamel has an interview. Part excerpted talking about the state of the conference vis-a-vis football.

http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/quad-qa-big-east-commissioner-mike-tranghese/

Question: I remember from reading Kevin McNamara's book on the Big East that there have been some near misses with difference schools over the years. Things have obviously worked out. But do you ever look back and wonder what would have happened if Penn State had come aboard?

Answer: I look back on the 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. If we had taken Penn State in 1982, we may still have football independents. The idea wasn't to take Penn State and start a football league. It was to give Penn State a place. And then they would have been aligned with Syracuse and Boston College. We probably would have brought Pitt in, too, and the four of them probably would have agreed to play and continue as independents. I think the whole face of college football would have changed. I don't think Florida State would have moved and Miami would have moved. All of it came about when Penn State made the decision to go to the Big Ten. I thought that in 1982, I was just a young staffer at this meeting. Dave wanted to go to Penn State and extend the invitation. But he couldn't if we didn't have the votes. And we had eight teams and needed six votes and it was a 5-3 vote. It was probably the only time that Dave couldn't drive a final decision in the years that he was the commissioner. I was just a staffer. I could say whatever I wanted to Dave. At the end of our meeting, Dave asked what I thought. In fact, it's in our minutes. I said, "˜We will rue the day over this decision.' And it's been pretty prophetic.

Question: Paterno has always tagged a lot of that on former Syracuse A.D. Jake Crouthamel, right?

Answer: Despite all the negativity that comes out about Jake, he fought like crazy for Penn State to be in the league. Syracuse and Boston College really fought to have Penn State because Jake understood the importance of Penn State. What happened in the previous fall, Penn State had tried to form a football league. Coach Paterno has laid a lot of this at Jake's feet, which I think is wrong. What never got written was that the basketball league was being pretty successful and they couldn't agree on revenue sharing in football. There wasn't going to be any revenue sharing. Jake just wasn't going to do that. The next year Dave brought it up for discussion and Jake was absolutely supportive. We voted five different times and all five times Jake voted for Penn State. And Bill Flynn at Boston College, God rest his soul, voted for Penn State all five times. The reason that they didn't get in was that the league was new, a lot of the directors felt it was a basketball league. Some of the directors felt that the concept of the Big East was big markets. It was a 5-3 vote that changed theface of history.

Question: A big part of your legacy is obviously going to revolve around helping save the league after the defections of Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech. How do you feel about football now and how you feel about football going forward?

Answer: Legacy is such a crazy word. I just would like to be remembered that when we had our darkest moments, we pulled up our bootstraps and we came through. I think we still have work to do in football. I think we've come a long way, but we still have to get better and I think that we can. I think our members would like to add a ninth team, but the right team is not out there yet. I think some day if it's there, they'll want to go after it. Football is a very competitive business and we're trying to compete with conferences larger than us. I mean we're trying to compete with the Southeastern Conference which has an inherent advantage being in the South. I have an inherent basketball advantage because I'm in New York. We all have inherent advantages and disadvantages. You've got to recognize what you have and what you don't have. We need for Syracuse to start winning in football. I don't think we can have any of our programs struggling. I think every one of them has got to be healthy. When we reconfigured, Pete, that's what I told our people. We don't have someone in this room that's going to win a national championship every year and compete for it every year. What we have to have are eight healthy and viable programs. And we've been close to that, but we haven't been there all the way. We still have work to do.