Big East Conference.

The Big East Conference is a collegiate athletics conference consisting of sixteen universities in the eastern half of the United States. The conference's 17 members participate in 24 NCAA sports. Eight of the seventeen conference schools are football members and the Big East competes as a BCS conference in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), the top level of NCAA competition in that sport. Three members have football programs but are not Big East football schools: Georgetown and Villanova compete in the Football Championship Subdivision and Notre Dame plays as an FBS independent. The other five schools Seton Hall, St. John's, DePaul, Marquette, and Providence discontinued their football programs.The Big East was founded in 1979 when Providence, St. John's, Georgetown, and Syracuse invited Seton Hall, Connecticut, Holy Cross, and Boston College to form a conference primarily focused on basketball, with Rutgers and Holy Cross declining to join. Villanova joined a year later in 1980 and Pittsburgh joined in 1982. In 1985, Penn State applied for membership, but was rejected, with only five schools in favor . It was long rumored that Syracuse cast the deciding vote against Penn State, but Mike Tranghese confirmed that this was not the case and that Syracuse had, in fact, voted for Penn State's inclusion.In 2010, Texas Christian University accepted an invitation to join the conference as an all-sports member beginning in the 2012–13 academic year. The school would have become the first Protestant university in a heavily Catholic conference. On October 6, 2011, the Big 12 Conference invited TCU to join. Four days later, TCU officially reversed its acceptance of the Big East invitation and accepted the Big 12 invitation beginning in the 2012–13 academic year.
On September 17, 2011, Syracuse and Pittsburgh announced that they will leave the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference. As of the announcement date, the effective date of the move was July 2014 because of a 27-month notice period required by conference bylaws; however, it was considered likely that the two schools would be able to negotiate an earlier exit.