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If things go the way they have with Philadelphia Big 5 teams winning the national championship, the next one should come in 2047 because Villanova basketball’s 2016 title came 31 years after its 1985 title and LaSalle’s 1954 title came 31 years prior to that.
Maybe, come 2047, it will be Temple’s turn—the Owls, after all, have been to two Final Fours and seven Elite Eights—but other ominous numbers point to the fact that this title could be the last for a non-Power 5 school, maybe ever. A very wise man said to follow the money and that seems to be the direction college basketball is going these days. Villanova pays its scholarship athletes a $2,600 Cost of Attendance (COA) stipend per year, but that is routinely half of what many of the Power 5 schools pay now.
Those conferences—the Big 10, Pac-12, SEC, Big 12 and ACC—are committed to widening that gap and the non-Power 5 conferences probably will not be able to keep up. Power 5 conferences fill up big football stadiums and have much more lucrative television deals. Money talks and recruits walk, and soon recruits facing the choice of getting half of what they could get elsewhere will figure that out before making commitments. Already, many of the P5 conferences are using COA against the G5 schools and are winning those one-on-one recruiting battles. Jay Wright is a great recruiter, but it is hard to recruit at a money disadvantage.
If Temple wins it in 2047, it will probably be because the school’s football program has elevated it to P5 status by then and not because 98-year-old head coach Fran Dunphy could be coming off his 33rd-straight AAC Coach of the Year Award. More likely, though, is that we have witnessed the end of an era and that cannot be good for college basketball.
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