The book is called Basketball Warfare, it’s by colleague Kevin McNamara, and if you want to understand big-time college sports today, or the Big East in particular, it’s required reading.

Suffice it to say that there’s no better analysis of the road that led to today’s 16-team Big East super conference, one that’s not only changed the landscape in the East, but also remains a powder keg, a mélange of fragile alliances and different interests, like some dysfunctional family with too many members.

Which was McNamara’s original idea.

“The Big East–ACC thing was really climatic,” he says. “There was so much upheaval, and I thought it should be chronicled. It was a very historic time in college basketball.”

This is the back story of the book, and it’s almost as timely as the current debate about which teams are on the NCAA Tournament bubble. For let’s not kid ourselves here. This is, indeed, basketball warfare, a high-stakes game of big money and big television markets, something far more complicated than trying to figure out a matchup zone. This is the theme McNamara mines as he followed last year’s season, the first in the expanded Big East, and one in which UConn and Villanova were highly ranked all year, both coming within a game of the Final Four.

“I thought the stuff that led up to last year was very important,” McNamara says. “How did it get to that point? For it really was the history of college athletics over the past 25 years.”

For sure.

Football has been the elephant in the Big East living room almost since the Big East began in 1979. It’s the reason why Pittsburgh came into the league in the early ’80s, the reason why Miami and West Virginia, came into the league in the ’90s, and Virginia Tech in 2001. It’s the reason why there’s long been a fundamental split in the conference between the football schools and the basketball schools, one that threatened the Big East’s existence as far back as the early ’80s.

But it was the ACC’s raid on Miami, Boston College, and Syracuse that threatened to slam-dunk the Big East and essentially create two new leagues in the East, one centered around football, one around basketball. One that would not only have disintegrated the Big East as we had come to know it, but severely impact the Atlantic 10, as everyone would have been fighting for a place to land in this basketball version of musical chairs.

“The ACC was going to take three teams and it was panic in the streets,” McNamara says.

Basketball Warfare does an excellent job of putting this into context, within the larger theme of how important football is to this. It’s something that’s often overlooked, especially around here. The Big East is so synonymous with basketball — it began as a strictly basketball conference — to the point that many people think basketball is the engine that drives the conference. Not so.

“People in Providence don’t comprehend how important football is,” says McNamara.

In a sense, even McNamara didn’t until he began writing the book. Little wonder. He’s been covering college basketball here at the Journal for 18 years, and before that he went to Syracuse, so rest assured he’s seen a lot of games. But even he was surprised at (1) how big football is, (2) and how much bigger college basketball is in places like Connecticut, Syracuse, and Louisville than it is here.

He spent last year traipsing around the Big East, focusing mainly on those three schools, and also on Villanova, a team that had a legitimate Final Four shot last year. The book takes us inside those programs in ways the sports pages can’t, like looking at a season from the inside out. From media day in New York, the symbolic start of the season, to the day UConn went ignominiously out of the NCAA Tournament, what McNamara calls “Doomsday,” the passion play of last year’s season is all there.

And what did McNamara learn that he didn’t know before, besides his belief that as long as the basketball schools bring value to this new Big East Conference they will be able to co-exist with the football schools.

“For coaches, it’s like life and death,” he says. “They are absolutely devastated after losses.”

That comes through Basketball Warfare like a blindside pick. The unrelenting pressure to win. The palpable sense that this is a high-pressure business, with little room for failure. In other words, it’s not just Tim Welsh who wears the tension of a Big East season on his face. All these coaches do. For these coaches are like high-wire acts without a net, coaching in the white-hot glare of the big-time with little margin of error, all in a league that takes few prisoners.

“I really enjoyed doing the book,” McNamara says, “for it allowed me to see the entire conference in a way I’d never seen it before.”

But maybe that goes without saying.

As is the fact that Basketball Warfare should be part of every basketball fan’s library.

breynold@projo.com