By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

You wonder what was going through the minds of some current and former Western Athletic Conference members when the settlement of the Big East Conference's suit against the Atlantic Coast Conference made headlines this week.

A penny for their thoughts? Maybe more like $1 million.

Four Big East schools — Connecticut, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and West Virginia — will split a reported $5 million settlement from departing members Boston College and Miami and the Atlantic Coast Conference that lured them away. In addition, there were scheduling concessions for future games.

The suit was remarkably similar to the one the WAC should have filed and, indeed, said it came within 24 hours of filing after eight schools — Air Force, Brigham Young, Colorado State, New Mexico, Nevada-Las Vegas, San Diego State, Utah and Wyoming — bolted to form the Mountain West Conference in 1999.

Even the language of the Big East suit, according to the Hartford Courant, charging: "a backroom conspiracy, born in secrecy, founded on greed, and carried out through calculated deceit" sounded close to what the WAC had been talking after the breakaway had begun with a clandestine airport meeting.

"WAC legal counsel felt we had a very strong case for damages," Karl Benson, WAC commissioner, said last week. "The depositions would have been very interesting."

The idea wasn't to try and force the defectors back but to limit the financial damage done by the MWC schools skipping off with what the WAC maintained would have been its $48 million ESPN television contract.

At the time, the WAC's own inability to stand united (how often have we heard that?) kept the suit from being filed. And some counseled against the suit feeling it would create too many enemies, harming the next round of conference alignment and future scheduling opportunities.

Ultimately, of course, the most concerned schools, including Hawai'i, didn't receive invitations from the MWC and the cross conference scheduling hasn't been all that much to write home about.

"They filed the suit we should have filed," was how Kenneth Mortimer, a strong proponent of he suit while UH President and member of the WAC Board of Directors, has since put it. That he was correct was driven home by the details of the Big East-ACC settlement.

In college sports sometimes it is the pass not thrown and the shot not taken that haunts you the most. Or, in this case, the suit not filed.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.