Big East Conference. American Collegiate Athletic Association consisting of Butler University, Creighton University, University of Connecticut, DePaul University, Georgetown University, Marquette University, St. John’s University, Seton Hall University, Villanova University, Xavier University and Providence University.
The conference was founded in 1979 by seven Eastern institutions with prominent men’s basketball programs: Georgetown, Syracuse University, Providence, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Connecticut, and Boston College. Villanova joined the following year and then the University of Pittsburgh in 1982. For Big East schools with Division IA (the top division of American college football at the time), those teams competed as independent teams until 1991, when the conference replaced the University of Miami. Added. ;The State University of New Jersey, Rutgers. Temple University; West Virginia University; and Virginia Tech. The latter four schools competed only in soccer. Five new schools joined Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Boston College to form the first Big East Football Conference. In 1995, Rutgers University and West Virginia University became full members, and Notre Dame also participated in all sports except football.
Virginia Tech became a full member of the conference in 2000, but joined the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) in 2004 with Miami. Temple also left the Big East that same year, and Boston College moved to the ACC in 2005. That year, the Big East offset these losses by adding University of Cincinnati DePaul, University of Louisville Marquette, and University of South Florida. . Temple returned to the conference in a football-only capacity in 2012 as West Virginia departed for the Big 12 Conference.
2013 saw the most drastic realignment in conference history, with Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, and Syracuse joining the ACC, and the remaining football schools forming the American Athletic Conference. The Big East then became a non-football conference, with the addition of Butler, Creighton, and Xavier to make up for the significant loss in membership. Connecticut State was one of the schools that left in 2013, but officially returned to the conference in 2020.
