Big East Greets New Faces but Braces for Uncertainty PONTE VEDRA, Fla. - If television producers wanted to cast the Big East Conference as a 1980s sitcom, the plot would revolve around a series of hastily arranged marriages constructed to avoid deportation. As the conference braces to grow to 18 teams in basketball and 13 in football and stretch from Boise to Providence to Tampa, its many athletic directors, coaches and officials met here this week. Call them college athletics" "Imperfect Strangers." Joe Bailey, the conference's interim commissioner, summed up the uncertainty - "change is sort of the new normal" - as jokes about the necessity for name tags filled the conference rooms. As awkward as this marriage of mutual desperation may appear, it can still be fiscally productive. Big East officials are again holding new colleagues" hands and singing "Kumbaya," hoping they can avoid more defections before their television deal is consummated in the fall. The Big East is months away from a lucrative television contract but a few realignment ripples from a nasty and complicated divorce. Uncertainty has become reality. Questions about how much the Big East would earn with its new television contract were countered by whispers about what would be the tipping point for the nonfootball schools to organize a coup and break up the conference. The few coaches who were brave enough to stray from the talking points about new markets and greater recruiting areas reluctantly pointed out the volatility the conference faces. Did we lose anybody this morning? Geno Auriemma, the Connecticut women's basketball coach, said with a smile. I have to check the roster. The notion that the whims of a university president in Idaho could impact, say, a perennial juggernaut like the Connecticut women's basketball program is indicative of the new world order. Football is still the financial king of college sports, and despite all of its basketball success, the Big East is scrambling for football identity since the departures of Syracuse, Pittsburgh, West Virginia and Texas Christian in the past year. The Big East's most lucrative asset remains its postseason basketball tournament, meaning these imperfect strangers need to learn to live together. "The football schools and the basketball schools, the way they are now, have a great need for each other, which usually creates a good relationship," Jay Wright, the men's basketball coach at Villanova, said. We both need each other right now, and we both know it. Those words are not exactly a greeting in a Hallmark card. But the Big East programs need one another at a time when the new postseason arrangement between the Southeastern Conference and the Big 12 appears to consolidate further the power in college football among the four most lucrative leagues: the SEC, the Big 12, the Pac-12 and the Big Ten. With universities like Rutgers and UConn openly lobbying for a spot in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and Louisville acknowledging privately it is poised to leave as soon as the phone rings, it is obvious that further chaos is just a phone call away. "Two years from now you may be back down here talking to some other people," Auriemma said. That's just the nature of where everything is right now. Before the league's epitaph can be chiseled, it is important to remember that the remnants of the Mountain West and Conference USA are not attractive alternatives. The potential money differential is so drastic that Boise State's television deal in the Big East could end up being in the same financial ballpark as virtually the entire Mountain West contract. Consider that the best team remaining in the Mountain West is Nevada and the best Conference USA school is either East Carolina or Southern Miss. The reality in the new Big East is that its football schools may not sizzle on television, but they have found the comparable stability of higher ground. For now, anyway.