NEW YORK — There's a lot of change afoot in the Big East, and the first immediately noticeable thing this week, with the arrival of college basketball's preseason, was the time and location of the league's media day. The only basketball-first of the five power conferences in college sports beat the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC to the punch by holding its festivities on Oct. 1 — a week before the Big Ten and ACC do the same. (The Big 12 and SEC will have their media days later in October.) It was a savvy move by Big East leadership to get its coaches out in front and initiate the hype cycle in advance of an important 2026-27 season — while also freeing up the coaches and for the rest of October to tend to practices, exhibitions, recruiting, etc. Then there was the setting: Thursday in Midtown Manhattan.
For the first time in a generation, the Big East did not hold its media day at Madison Square Garden. (Harry Styles and his 30-show residency at MSG also complicated matters.) The New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square was a nice change of pace — and given the time constraints of holding media day at MSG (which is often quite busy with so many bookings in October), the Big East was able to give more airtime to its men's and women's programs on Thursday. It did so with intention, as the league is approaching a consequential season amid more reorg in 2026 than any of the other high-major conferences. The Big East is under new management; Val Ackerman's summer retirement segued into the appointment of Tim Brosnan as the league's new commissioner.
Brosnan is a Georgetown grad, lifelong New Yorker and someone who previously spent a lot of time as one of the key executives at Major League Baseball. (The league also has a new chief basketball officer in Paul Brazeau, a big coup, as he was lured away from the ACC. Brazeau previously worked with the Big East.) As for Brosnan, the 68-year-old was hired in no small part for his business acumen and ability to make league-altering money. At a time when the high-major football leagues are making billions in their television contracts, the Big East needs to be as ambitious and aggressive as possible while staying true to the league's DNA that has kept it among the most successful and relevant programs across the past 45 years of college basketball.
The timing is apropos, then, because the Big East's 11 programs' collective spending capacity skyrocketed this offseason. In talking to sources at every school in recent days, CBS Sports learned that the Big East is poised to spend more than $135 million across its 11 men's rosters this season, which averages out to more than $12 million per school. (Last year, that number probably would've been in the vicinity of $7 million on average.) While NIL spending boosted across the high-major landscape, the Big East's coaches, athletic directors and presidents were especially motivated coming off arguably the league's worst regular season in its 47-year history. Though UConn (again) salvaged so much of the league's reputation by making an NCAA title game run as a No. 2 seed, the conference sent just three teams to the Big Dance (St.
John's and Villanova joined the Huskies). Three bids marked the fewest in Big East history. The league also ranked fifth out of the Power Five conferences in advanced metrics due to Butler, Creighton, Marquette and Providence all falling well short of expectations.
As a result, three of those four schools underwent coaching changes. Former South Florida coach Bryan Hodgson is now the guy at Providence, Alan Huss bumped up as the coach-in-waiting at Creighton, and Butler alumnus Ronald Nored was hired to try and get the Bulldogs back into the thick of the league race with regularity. In talking with Brosnan and the coaches on Thursday, the standard has undeniably and unapologetically gone up — and it's not just because of last year's letdown.
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