The Big East, obviously, is a basketball conference.

Not a basketball-only conference, but certainly a basketball-first conference.

UConn athletic director David Benedict would like the league to lean harder into that identity.

“When I was in the SEC and I lived in the state of Alabama, one thing was 100 percent every day you woke up – there was going to be talk about Auburn and Alabama and college football,” said Benedict, who was the Auburn athletic department’s chief operating officer before starting at UConn in 2016. “The SEC’s got their tagline: ‘It just means more.’ Basketball should be 24 hours a day and 365 days a year for the Big East. If we approach it that way, I think we can reposition ourselves that the Big East is the conference of choice for the best college basketball prospects in the country. But I don’t know that we operate with that mentality. We’ve had a lot of success. But I don’t know that we’ve operated with that mentality on a day-to-day basis. I think it’s critically important that if we want to not just maintain our position, but elevate our position, that’s something we could do.”

Quite often in recent years, the little 11-team Big East has cannibalized itself during the regular season and had some of its members shouldered off the men’s NCAA Tournament stage by massive, football-driven power conferences. The Big East had three tournament teams last season (UConn, St. John’s, Villanova), five in 2025, three in 2024.

With commissioner Val Ackerman set to retire Aug. 31, and the search for her replacement underway, the conference has entered a transitional phase. The Big East rose from the ashes of conference realignment to reinvent itself in 2013 and has won four men’s national championships in the small window since – two by Villanova, two by UConn – but the next 5-10 years must be about a widespread show of strength more so than survival.

There is a nice foundation. The conference has a media deal in place through the 2030-31 season with Fox Sports as the lead partner and an agreement for Madison Square Garden to stage the Big East Tournament through 2032. With Dan Hurley at UConn, Rick Pitino at St. John’s and Kevin Willard at Villanova, the top tier programs are in good hands.

But if the Big East is going to be about basketball first – or, in messaging and branding, pretty much basketball only – it can’t run the risk of being secondary in competition or conversation to the ACC or the SEC or the Big Ten or the Big 12. UConn has a unique place in all of this, of course, as a national basketball power existing outside of the power conference world, and as the only member of the Big East running a football program on the sport’s top level.

It’s on UConn to make what it will of its independent football program.

It’s on UConn and the Big East to make sure basketball remains an integral consideration to the sweeping change at hand in college sports.

“Val navigated the change and the rebuilding of the Big East,” Benedict said. “Now we’re in a time where, no different than our job as athletic directors, I think conference commissioner roles are changing. We need someone that certainly understands what we are, because we are different in a lot of ways. They’ve got to be able to position the Big East for what could be a changing landscape in college basketball, and we should be positioned in a way that we’re part of the elite conferences and that we are not just someone tagging along for the ride, that we’re helping drive whatever the change is.”

So the next commissioner, ideally, is going to be well connected in the NCAA and in the media, and is going to have proactive ideas for the conference’s growth – which might start with, growth, period. Is 11 teams enough? To keep going, sure, but to enhance a profile and/or March footprints?

The Big East needs more teams playing well into March. The NCAA Tournament is expanding to 76 teams, surely a move to placate the Power Four, with each conference wanting half of its 16-18 teams earning postseason units. Every year the tournament is watered down by big-name-little-game programs that win half (or fewer) of their conference games and expect to bounce off the NCAA bubble into the big dance. But, hey, it’s not so dissimilar from the old Big East, where, in 2011, UConn finished ninth and won the national championship in a year when 11 of the conference’s 16 teams made the tournament.

Half the Big East is just 5-6 teams but the round robin nature of the compact schedule, with each team playing all the others twice, makes for a scenario where everyone is guaranteed to beat up on each other. In bigger conferences, power conferences, many of the top basketball teams don’t play the other top teams twice, and the football teams, with nine conference games, might not play each other at all.

UConn isn’t going to be in the Big East forever, which is to suggest nothing beyond that partnership stretching anywhere from, say, 50 more months to 50 more years. Another round of conference realignment is inevitable, eventually, but it’s impossible to predict how UConn will fit in and where.

It’s no secret that the Huskies continue to look for a home in the power conference world, the profile it fits as a large public university with an FBS football program. There were summers of Big 12 explorations in recent years. And surely, if ever, say, the SEC looks to expand to keep up with expected expansion of the College Football Playoff, the majority of its new programs will come from the ACC – a conference UConn would seemingly be well-positioned to, finally, join.

Real movement there is probably a few years down the line.

For now, UConn is the standard bearer for the Big East, which has begun a national search for Ackerman’s replacement.

“We need someone who is capable of commercializing some of the assets the Big East owns and creating a narrative that, if you’re a potential prospect that wants to play college basketball, that the only place and the best place for you to play is in the Big East because, at the end of the day, the Big East thinks about, talks about, college basketball 365 days a year,” Benedict said.

Big East teams take in roughly one-tenth of what power conference teams do in media rights, but there’s a narrative that funding basketball through revenue sharing is easy with the absence of football. It’s less complicated, at least, but all these schools still need to actually have the type of money that football generates. And any time the Power Four is disadvantaged in any way sure a correction will follow, which is what led to a 76-team tournament.

The Big East needs to fill 6-7 slots every year, bulking up nonconference schedules the way UConn does before knocking each other sideways in December-February. UConn is taking care of its own house. It needs the neighborhood to be stronger than ever.

“I don’t really concern myself with whether people think we’re Blue Bloods or not,” Benedict said. “The reality is that no one, right now, is accomplishing what we are in college basketball. Nobody else. The job of the administration is to figure out how to continue to help our coaches keep that going. I think they’ve both proven – obviously Geno [Auriemma] for a very long time, and Dan certainly over the last five or six years – that, provided the necessary resources, we can expect to be very, very competitive and have great results.”