By Bill Koch
The production might have seemed a bit overblown to those who didn't know the history of UC athletics, with the band blaring the school fight song in the Kingsgate Conference Center and the cheerleaders showing up dressed in their uniforms, as if they were at a football or basketball game.
But for longtime followers of the Bearcats it was impossible to overstate the significance of the announcement on Nov. 4, 2003, that UC was leaving Conference USA to join the Big East beginning with the 2005-06 school year.
If it wasn’t the most important development in the history of the school’s athletics program, it ranked second only to the back-to-back national championships the Bearcats won in 1961 and 1962.
UC athletic director Bob Goin began to engineer the move in late June of 2003 when Virginia Tech and Miami announced they were leaving the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference.
At long last, the Bearcats, who had moved from league to league – the Metro Conference, the Great Midwest Conference and C-USA to name a few – looking for the perfect fit, had found a home that would end their nomadic existence.
“It places our university in some outstanding markets,” Goin said. “It widens our recruiting base and it puts us in a position to recruit young men and young women that we choose to.”
As a member of the Big East, the UC football program became part of the Bowl Championship Series that determined which schools played for the national championship.
The basketball team, already a nationally-recognized program, would get the chance to compete in a conference that many believed was the most competitive in the country.
I remember looking up at the platform that day, seeing basketball coach Bob Huggins, football coach Rick Minter, women’s basketball coach Laurie Pirtle, UC president Nancy Zimpher, and Goin facing the media and a throng of UC supporters. I wondered how many would still be in their same jobs in two years when the Bearcats actually started to compete in the Big East.
For the moment, though, everyone was giddy with excitement. And they had good reason to be.
“We’ve said all along that we want to be in a conference with a BCS affiliation,” Minter said. “Because of the location of the schools, this is a natural for us. Of all the six major conferences out there, this one is the profile we fit the best. We want to be able to go head-to-head with those schools in competition and be able to match up with them in recruiting.”
Huggins was more reserved. The basketball program, he said, was already on the level of the Big East schools it would now be competing against in league play.
“We play those people anyway,” Huggins said. “We’ve played a national schedule since I’ve been here. But I think it’s the best thing for the university. That’s got to be first and foremost.”
Huggins acknowledged that the Big East was a tougher league than C-USA.
“Top to bottom, there’s a big difference,” he said. “I’ve said that from Day 1. We brought people in for football purposes that killed our RPI.”
If it had been up to Goin and other UC officials, the Bearcats would have joined the Big East for the 2004-05 season, but they had to wait until the fall of 2005. When the time came, it set off another wave of celebration. Friday, July 1, 2005, was the day that UC officially became a member of the Big East. To mark the occasion, UC threw a party on Fountain Square.
“It’s a great day for the university,” Goin said the day before the celebration. “I just hope people come out and enjoy the value of that. This is the ultimate conference for the university to be in.”
What should have been a cause for unbridled celebration was spoiled by boos directed at Zimpher when she made remarks during the festivities to the roughly 1,000 UC supporters, some of whom were angry with the university’s decision not to renew the rollover provision of Huggins’ contract in the wake of a DUI to which he pleaded no contest a year earlier.
According to the Enquirer’s Lori Kurtzman, a small group booed at the mention of Zimpher’s name and several in the audience wore T-shirts that read, “I support Bob Huggins.”
By then, Minter had already been fired and replaced by Mark Dantonio, who would coach the Bearcats during their first season in the Big East.
Huggins would never coach UC in the Big East. He was fired seven weeks after the Fountain Square shindig, replaced by his assistant Andy Kennedy, who became interim head coach for one season. Goin retired on Dec. 1, and was replaced by Mike Thomas, who hired Mick Cronin to coach the basketball team moving forward in the Big East.
By the time UC actually started to compete in the Big East, much of the cast that had sat on that platform in 2003 was gone. But that didn't diminish the significance of UC's move to its new conference home. The relationship would prove most beneficial to the Bearcats' football program, which was able to hire Brian Kelly as its head coach, and went to the Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl in 2008 and 2009, narrowly missing an appearance in the national championship game at the end of the 2009 season.
But the Bearcats' ultimate conference didn’t last. In September 2011, the Big East started to fall apart with the announcement that Pitt and Syracuse were leaving for the ACC. By 2013, the Big East was gone, and UC was in the American Athletic Conference, back to searching for its perfect conference fit.
The production might have seemed a bit overblown to those who didn't know the history of UC athletics, with the band blaring the school fight song in the Kingsgate Conference Center and the cheerleaders showing up dressed in their uniforms, as if they were at a football or basketball game.
But for longtime followers of the Bearcats it was impossible to overstate the significance of the announcement on Nov. 4, 2003, that UC was leaving Conference USA to join the Big East beginning with the 2005-06 school year.
If it wasn’t the most important development in the history of the school’s athletics program, it ranked second only to the back-to-back national championships the Bearcats won in 1961 and 1962.
UC athletic director Bob Goin began to engineer the move in late June of 2003 when Virginia Tech and Miami announced they were leaving the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference.
At long last, the Bearcats, who had moved from league to league – the Metro Conference, the Great Midwest Conference and C-USA to name a few – looking for the perfect fit, had found a home that would end their nomadic existence.
“It places our university in some outstanding markets,” Goin said. “It widens our recruiting base and it puts us in a position to recruit young men and young women that we choose to.”
As a member of the Big East, the UC football program became part of the Bowl Championship Series that determined which schools played for the national championship.
The basketball team, already a nationally-recognized program, would get the chance to compete in a conference that many believed was the most competitive in the country.
I remember looking up at the platform that day, seeing basketball coach Bob Huggins, football coach Rick Minter, women’s basketball coach Laurie Pirtle, UC president Nancy Zimpher, and Goin facing the media and a throng of UC supporters. I wondered how many would still be in their same jobs in two years when the Bearcats actually started to compete in the Big East.
For the moment, though, everyone was giddy with excitement. And they had good reason to be.
“We’ve said all along that we want to be in a conference with a BCS affiliation,” Minter said. “Because of the location of the schools, this is a natural for us. Of all the six major conferences out there, this one is the profile we fit the best. We want to be able to go head-to-head with those schools in competition and be able to match up with them in recruiting.”
Huggins was more reserved. The basketball program, he said, was already on the level of the Big East schools it would now be competing against in league play.
“We play those people anyway,” Huggins said. “We’ve played a national schedule since I’ve been here. But I think it’s the best thing for the university. That’s got to be first and foremost.”
Huggins acknowledged that the Big East was a tougher league than C-USA.
“Top to bottom, there’s a big difference,” he said. “I’ve said that from Day 1. We brought people in for football purposes that killed our RPI.”
If it had been up to Goin and other UC officials, the Bearcats would have joined the Big East for the 2004-05 season, but they had to wait until the fall of 2005. When the time came, it set off another wave of celebration. Friday, July 1, 2005, was the day that UC officially became a member of the Big East. To mark the occasion, UC threw a party on Fountain Square.
“It’s a great day for the university,” Goin said the day before the celebration. “I just hope people come out and enjoy the value of that. This is the ultimate conference for the university to be in.”
What should have been a cause for unbridled celebration was spoiled by boos directed at Zimpher when she made remarks during the festivities to the roughly 1,000 UC supporters, some of whom were angry with the university’s decision not to renew the rollover provision of Huggins’ contract in the wake of a DUI to which he pleaded no contest a year earlier.
According to the Enquirer’s Lori Kurtzman, a small group booed at the mention of Zimpher’s name and several in the audience wore T-shirts that read, “I support Bob Huggins.”
By then, Minter had already been fired and replaced by Mark Dantonio, who would coach the Bearcats during their first season in the Big East.
Huggins would never coach UC in the Big East. He was fired seven weeks after the Fountain Square shindig, replaced by his assistant Andy Kennedy, who became interim head coach for one season. Goin retired on Dec. 1, and was replaced by Mike Thomas, who hired Mick Cronin to coach the basketball team moving forward in the Big East.
By the time UC actually started to compete in the Big East, much of the cast that had sat on that platform in 2003 was gone. But that didn't diminish the significance of UC's move to its new conference home. The relationship would prove most beneficial to the Bearcats' football program, which was able to hire Brian Kelly as its head coach, and went to the Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl in 2008 and 2009, narrowly missing an appearance in the national championship game at the end of the 2009 season.
But the Bearcats' ultimate conference didn’t last. In September 2011, the Big East started to fall apart with the announcement that Pitt and Syracuse were leaving for the ACC. By 2013, the Big East was gone, and UC was in the American Athletic Conference, back to searching for its perfect conference fit.
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