Temple in Talks to Join Big East at BetLM

Temple in Talks to Join Big East

PHILADELPHIA – Tem­ple and the Big East are talk­ing about the Owls rejoin­ing the con­fer­ence as soon as next season.

MAC Com­mis­sioner Jon A. Stein­brecher said in a state­ment Wednes­day that his league is “aware that Tem­ple has been in dis­cus­sions with the Big East regard­ing membership.”

A per­son famil­iar with the talks says the school and the Big East are try­ing to nego­ti­ate a deal that could have Tem­ple in the league for all sports by next sea­son. The per­son spoke Wednes­day to The Asso­ci­ated Press on con­di­tion of anonymity because the talks are still ongoing.

Tem­ple played in the Big East in foot­ball only from 1991–2004, but was forced out of the league. It played as a foot­ball inde­pen­dent and even­tu­ally landed in the Mid-American Con­fer­ence in 2007. The Owls’ other sports pro­grams, includ­ing men’s and women’s bas­ket­ball, are in the Atlantic 10.

The Big East has a vacancy next sea­son now that West Vir­ginia is being allowed to leave imme­di­ately for the Big 12. The school and the con­fer­ence set­tled com­pet­ing law­suits last week. The Big East will receive $ 20 mil­lion dol­lars from West Vir­ginia in return for set­ting aside its 27-month noti­fi­ca­tion period.

The New York Times reported on the talks between Tem­ple and the Big East ear­lier Wednesday.

The MAC has had 13 foot­ball schools since adding Tem­ple in 2007. Last year, the MAC added Mass­a­chu­setts as a football-only mem­ber, begin­ning in the 2012 sea­son. At the same time, the MAC put in place new exit pro­vi­sions which state that any football-only mem­ber wish­ing to leave the con­fer­ence would need to pro­vide notice two foot­ball sea­sons (24 months) before depar­ture and pay a fee of $ 2.5 million.

“Our posi­tion on this mat­ter is that we have a con­tract in place with specifics that will gov­ern and deter­mine how this mat­ter is han­dled,” Stein­brecher said.

The Big East has added seven schools since Decem­ber, but most of them are plan­ning to join in 2013. Navy is com­mit­ted to become a football-only mem­ber of the Big East in 2015. The Big East was hop­ing to get one of its future mem­bers to join a year early to replace West Vir­ginia. Boise State was the most likely can­di­date to move up its arrival.

Adding Tem­ple for 2012 would not only allow Big East mem­bers to fill West Virginia’s spot on their foot­ball sched­ules, it would give the con­fer­ence another peren­ni­ally strong bas­ket­ball pro­gram to help make up for the even­tual losses of Pitts­burgh and Syra­cuse to the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Pitt and Syra­cuse have said they won’t fight the Big East for an early exit, though Com­mis­sioner John Mar­i­natto said after the West Vir­ginia case was set­tled that the Big East would be open to dis­cussing the Pan­thers and Orange leav­ing after the 2012–13 season.

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Col­lege Foot­ball Writer Ralph Russo con­tributed to this report.

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