Posted on: Tuesday, June 10, 2003

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

"A deliberate scheme initiated by the Defendants to destroy (the league) and abscond with the collective value of all that has been invested and created ..." is how an Associated Press report describes the allegations in a suit brought by five Big East schools against Miami, Boston College and the Atlantic Coast Conference that is attempting to lure them away.

Five years ago the words and the passion behind them could well have been from the suit the Western Athletic Conference said it planned to file against the schools that broke away to form the Mountain West Conference.

In fact, former University of Hawai'i President Kenneth Mortimer, a proponent of a WAC suit, said he told his wife over the weekend, "they filed the suit we should have filed."

It would be interesting to know how many cases of second thoughts there are among WAC members this week. Indeed, you have to wonder now if the WAC realizes how much it missed the boat by not filing such a suit right after the cabal of eight announced in May 1998 its intention to break away instead of kicking it around for a year before dropping the issue.

At the time, the WAC had hired a Colorado law firm, a public relations agency and was readying what was then-described as a $40 million suit to recover the damages it was prepared to claim were caused by the split.

In the best-case scenario, timely action might have brought the renegades back to the bargaining table to do what they should have done in the first place, negotiate for a good faith resolution of the issues they say drove them away.

As commissioner Karl Benson told the Denver Post, the prevailing feeling was that "unfortunately greed got in the way of patience."

Maybe the league could have been preserved for a time or, at the least, a more equitable succession worked out for all concerned.

For at the time, the WAC was in a better position than the Big East is today. The fledgling MWC — it didn't have a name for more than four months after the split — didn't have anything approaching the multi-million dollar war chest that the big bucks ACC can call upon to fight the Big East suit today. And the WAC believed it had the presidents of the renegade schools on the hook as directors of the conference they had clandestinely torpedoed.

At the least, you'd have to figure the MWC would have gone for some sort of a settlement. Maybe it would have even been forced to leave behind some of the seven-year, $48 million ABC/ESPN television contract WAC officials said they had negotiated before the breakaway.

Four years after it dropped its plans to sue the schools that left it, the WAC can tune into the Big East-ACC proceedings as something more than a distant observer and wonder what might have been.