If the architects of the conference had known then what they know now, what would they have done differently?

Tranghese said: “In hindsight, you say the league had 20-something pretty good years when you look at it, but now with what’s going on — you look at it in hindsight, I think the question is pretty interesting. I don’t know how to answer it.”

For all of the league’s success, it now realizes, perhaps too late, that football is king. No matter how many cheering fans, no matter how many teams are invited to the N.C.A.A. tournament, without a hefty television contract for football, the Big East will fall from the ranks of the 1 percent of the college sports elite.

Tranghese tried to tell the Big East’s university presidents and athletic directors as much as early as 1989 when he was Gavitt’s assistant. Gavitt thought the conference needed to bring Penn State into the fold. Penn State was an independent at the time, looking for the security of a conference.

The membership voted no, with St. John’s, Villanova and Georgetown leading the resistance. At the end of the meeting, Gavitt asked Tranghese what he thought about the decision. “I said, ‘We will all rue the day about this decision,’ ” Tranghese said. “I understood how big football was. I didn’t understand how big it was going to become.

“At that point, the Big East had so much success in the ’80s, everybody sort of forgot about it. But I felt looking back on the history of the Big East, that was probably the biggest mistake we made.”