As the news continues to get worse for the Big East and Commissioner John Marinatto, with TCU apparently leaving the league before it ever started playing in it, there are those questioning Marinatto's leadership.

The argument goes that somebody else, maybe anybody else, in a position of leadership would have been able to stop the bleeding and somehow prevent Pittsburgh, Syracuse and now the Horned Frogs from departing.

But keep in mind Marinatto works for all the schools in the Big East, not just ones that play football. The fact that half of the league's schools don't play football in the conference and have different priorities and agendas than the schools that do is the genesis of the problems that the Big East has been facing for years.

All those schools on both sides of the football divide are always going to do what's in their own best interests. Athletics department officials and university administrators get their paychecks from the schools that employ them, not the conference office.

The Big East is almost like the Frankenstein monster of college athletic conferences with some mismatched schools put together to see if a viable league can come to life. There are a few teams over here playing most sports, a few over there playing everything but big-time football, and then there's Notre Dame, which has never been interested in joining the football schools even though it plays the sport at the highest level.

On paper, what does West Virginia appear to have in common with De Paul? How about South Florida and Seton Hall? See a lot of similarities there?

The various additions of schools to the Big East over the years have often been marriages of convenience. The departures have been similar to what happens in divorces when one partner seeks something better.

Maybe the Big East's problems could have been avoided three decades ago if Penn State had been admitted when it wanted in. There was a feeling by some in the conference that it was a mistake to keep the Nittany Lions on the outside when they clearly wanted a conference home for basketball and their non-revenue sports.

Would Penn State have eventually left for the Big Ten anyway? Maybe, but we all know what really did happen when the Big East turned thumbs down.

The Big East was formed as a basketball league back in the late 1970s, which is almost like the dark ages compared with what college athletics look like now. A lot has changed. The NCAA no longer controls football broadcast rights, the schools and conferences do.

There was no Internet in those days. There was no ESPN. There were no Thursday night TV games. There weren't nearly as many women's sports on campuses in those years, so athletic scholarship costs for schools were much less than they are today.

And there was no Bowl Championship Series. The BCS turned into the big game changer, and football became king because the money got huge. Teams started scrambling to get a cut. And they've kept up the scrambling to get a bigger cut.

The late Dave Gavitt, who really put the Big East together, was a visionary. Gavitt, who died three weeks ago, just hours before word started to leak out that Pitt and Syracuse were heading out the door, had an idea in the late 1970's to put marquee basketball programs from big northeast television markets in one conference, make a killing on TV rights and grow the league.

His plan worked to perfection. At first.

In 1985, the league sent three teams -- Georgetown, Villanova and St. John's -- to the Final Four, a feat never duplicated.

But within six years of that, the Big East had to start sponsoring football in order to placate its football-playing members. West Virginia, Temple, Virginia Tech and Rutgers were invited as football-only schools. The template that Gavitt had developed was already starting to fracture, and the league was changing.

Two decades later, the changes haven't stopped.