Tranghese

NEWPORT — Mike Tranghese may have a full football and basketball season remaining before his tenure ends as the Big East Conference commissioner, but the league is already planning for life under a new boss.

At the league’s annual football media day yesterday at the Viking Hotel, coaches and administrators praised Tranghese’s leadership and made it clear that finding a strong replacement when he leaves in June is a major concern. The conference has put together a committee of six school presidents (Georgetown, Marquette, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and South Florida) who are charged with hiring a new leader.

“The good thing is I don’t sense any turf (wars) in this thing. They want a good person who can handle this whole thing with an appreciation for what we are and how we’ve gotten here,” Tranghese said.

Tranghese is clearly a proponent of seeing an administrator with Big East roots succeed him. A leading candidate could be the Big East’s senior associate commissioner, ex-Providence College athletic director John Marinatto, or perhaps a key athletic director like UConn’s Jeff Hathaway or Louisville’s Tom Jurich. Asked if it might be better for a person to be hired from outside the league, Tranghese said, “That person is going to have to convince our presidents of that.”

Big East football coaches know how important Tranghese has been to them. Five years ago, the conference’s existence was threatened when Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech left the league for the greener pastures (re: more money) of the Atlantic Coast Conference. The remaining football schools voted to act in unison and break off from the basketball schools (like PC and Georgetown), but Tranghese and the league’s presidents cobbled together a compromise that kept everyone together and added football-playing members Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida.

Against great odds, the Big East’s football fortunes have shined of late. The Big East not only retained its spot in the lucrative Bowl Championship Series, but also has seen its top team beat the ACC, Big 12 and SEC representatives he last three seasons.

“One of the great stories, to me, in the history of college football has been the history of Mike Tranghese and what he did with the Big East Conference,” said South Florida coach Jim Leavitt. “It’s a story of a man who passionately held a conference together, and had great vision and made extremely good decisions when the whole world seemed to be coming to an end. Twenty years from now, they’ll look back and see it’s one of the great stories.”

Leavitt, whose team is picked to finish second in the Big East behind West Virginia this fall, says that Tranghese’s leadership has sparked a new line of conversation about Big East football.

“Now, when you look at the three teams that left, they’ve become so watered down and the Big East has become the story,” Leavitt said. “The story is no longer those three teams leaving. The story is the Big East and what’s happened here.”

Dave Wannstedt, the coach at Pittsburgh, called Tranghese “a respected leader,” and said that “it’s obviously going to be very important that we get the right individual who continues on with what Mike put together here.”

Tranghese said that regardless of whom his successor is, he believes the conference office will remain in Providence, in part because of the region’s affordability.

“I don’t think there’s any place to go,” he said. “The most logical place to go is New York, but that’s 40 percent higher expenses.”

Tranghese has always stressed the importance of establishing credibility on the field (or court) and not listening to naysayers. That’s served the revitalization of the football conference very well and made the entire 16-school Big East even stronger.

“We just think we’re pretty good,” he said. “Our goal was to be amongst the six (top football conferences) and people would stop asking whether we belong. Now I don’t hear that anymore. We’ve proven ourselves.”

kmcnamar@projo.com