On April 11, 1951, the six column headline above the masthead of The HOYA told of the story of four deaths which shook the campus: three men, one program.

During spring break, three students, including the President of the Yard and the outgoing Editor in Chief of the HOYA were killed in a plane crash. Around that same time, the school's football program was terminated.

Aside the paper's thoughts for their fellow classmates, discussion on the football program was unusually tepid. "As long as the decision was made, let us seek out the good," was as confrontational as The HOYA would go, despite significant alumni and student opposition. It was clear that the cost of questioning the decision of the Rector-President was swift and irrevocable, and the subject went untouched for over a decade afterwards.

The loss of football was more than a sport, however. Revenues from ticket sales at Griffith Stadium represented the only variable source of income for the athletic department (McDonough Gymnasium, still under construction, was constructed for a campus audience and was not designed to make money.). When times were good and football crowds approached 25,000, Georgetown did well. In lean times, the prior season among them, crowds of 6,000 were not enough. The loss of football represented a financial consideration that would not even be matched until the late 1970's, when Georgetown basketball outgrew the campus environs to which it had modesty competed, with little or no outside income.

By 1979, inflation, Title IX, and sport expansion threatened to put Georgetown's basketball program (and many of the so-called "minor sports") out of business. One student representative went so far as to propose reducing the basketball program to a non-NCAA level so as to redistribute funds to where it was most needed. John Thompson's team could not pay everyone's bills.

But a series of meetings by athletic directors Frank Rienzo, Jake Crouthamel, Jack Kaiser and Dave Gavitt changed the face of college sports. The seven school circuit, from urban Washington to bucolic Storrs, Connecticut would work hand in hand with an upstart cable TV network to provide a revenue stream for seven of the Northeast's best independent teams. The TV followed. The wins followed. Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullin followed. The Final Fours followed.

The Big East Conference was born on July 1, 1979. By many accounts, it died by an arsonist's torch on December 13, 2012.

What is being proposed from its remains, however, is neither the innovative touch of Dave Gavitt nor the financial cares of Frank Rienzo. After having accepted the likes of Pittsburgh, Miami, Rutgers, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Notre Dame, Louisville, Cincinnati, South Florida, DePaul, Marquette, Texas Christian, Southern Methodist, Houston, Central Florida, Memphis, Temple, Boise State, San Diego State, Navy, East Carolina, and Tulane, the seven smallest schools have apparently decided that playing in its own parochial sandbox is preferable to being the outliers in a grand, if second-tier, national conference.

Ah, but the devil is in the details, or the dollars.

In 1979, college basketball on TV was a novelty. Today , it is a commodity. A game with DePaul and Providence is no more valuable than Southern Illinois and Drake, or Clemson and Florida State. Television has corrupted and reshaped college athletics in ways that supercede the NCAA itself, and to retreat to a lost era and try to reinvent 1979 all over again is a recipe for financial ruin to those schools most highly leveraged in college basketball, namely, Georgetown University.

In 2012, Georgetown spent $10 million on men's basketball, a 16% increase from 2011 and an astounding 200% increase from the end of the Craig Esherick era . Men's basketball is one third of a $33 million athletic budget that was less than $1 million at the start of the Big East conference. While understandably dwarfed by the likes of Texas or Ohio State, Georgetown's athletic budget is larger than East Carolina, Temple, Tulane, and 20 other "football schools" of some renown. In 2011, only nine schools in the nation spent more on basketball than Georgetown: Duke, Louisville, Kentucky, Maryland, Marquette, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan State, and Florida.

How does Georgetown do it? A lot of schools would like to know. With a mix of pragmatism, persistence, and alchemy, Georgetown has been able to float a 29 sport program on the back of one single revenue sport. The men's soccer team does not get to the College Cup if basketball is not financially self-sustaining. Golf and tennis teams cannot compete nationally if basketball cannot pay its bills. Football does not get the ability to play on ESPNU if the Big East TV contract does not allow basketball to thrive.

And that's the risk of the CYO League that the sports writers of the world would not have you dwell upon. In their longing to either a) return to the good old days of Louie, Rollie and Big John, or conversely, 2) to return the money and influence back to the big-time school level (now known collectively as superconferences), there is no guarantee that this league as suggested will be able to perform the high-wire act that Georgetown has ably mastered in the Big East era, beginning with Frank Rienzo and Joe Lang, and most recently under Lee Reed.

If Georgetown can't "afford" basketball, say goodbye to scholarship soccer and lacrosse. Say goodbye to 29 sports and the students that come to play there. Say goodbye to the nationwide visibility that is unique to that 110 acre campus in Washington DC.

And say goodbye to nationally relevant basketball at Georgetown.

Can the CYO League match the Big East's $1.5 million per school contract? Maybe, maybe not. The Atlantic 10 provides just over $100,000 per school. What would be the impact if the CYO League was left with that? Even if the number was $1 million, what would be the impact? And if the number was somehow $2 million, would that be enough in the escalating world of college basketball?

Eight years ago, $2 million would have paid nearly eight months of the annual men's basketball budget. In 2012, it would pay for just two months. In eight more years, what then?

There are five legs on the pentagonal table that supports basketball at Georgetown University. If any of the five wobble, the table wobbles. If any of the five are lost, the table collapses.

The first is TV-this is what sets Georgetown part from the A-10's and Conference USA teams of the world, and ironically what did it in. The racketeering tactics of ESPN and its surrogates continued to lower the market value of the contract by picking off schools that were afraid of being caught without a chair when the music stopped. (Tonight, those schools are Connecticut and Cincinnati). Over time, they whispered through surrogates at Providence and St. John's that they could get a better deal on its own than going through the conference's package-divide and conquer.

But if this new league is unable to negotiate a forward-earning TV package, or ESPN pulls a bait and switch and offers them far less than what they were making in the Big East none of the other four sources can grow fast enough to cover the shortfall. What gets cut--coaches, travel, recruiting?

The second leg of the table is NCAA tournament credits. As noted on this site in 2011:

"The Big East Conference files a public record document, called a IRS Form 990, which details disbursements to its schools. In 2010, per Form 990, the Big East distributed over $97 million to its 16 schools, a mix of TV, NCAA tournament, BCS proceeds, and other sport distributions. For Georgetown, that amount was $3.88 million, an amount larger than the 2010 basketball expenses of 256 Division I programs.

"A large chunk of that money comes to Georgetown exclusively because of its affiliation in a BCS-level conference such as the Big East. A retreat to a basketball-only conference simply will not be eligible for the kind of sums the Big East has been able to provide its members, from the $2.6 million at DePaul to over $10.4 million received by West Virginia last year.

If they dissolve the conference, accumulated NCAA TV credits are dispersed and do not accrue over their six year life. It also goes without saying that a new conference with 3 or 4 possible bids instead of 8-10 in a superconference will get fewer and fewer credits going forward.

As we asked in 2011, "If a basketball-only conference is marginalized for NCAA tournament purposes, is Georgetown prepared to absorb a loss of $1 million or more per year as a result?"

The third plank is ticket sales. While Georgetown's average ranks among the top 30 nationally, revenue is sharply curtailed by the significant revenues due Verizon Center for the use of its facilities. While average attendance grew 60% in the JT III era, over the last few seasons, Georgetown may have reached a ceiling of average attendance at just under 13,000.

One in five tickets sold to Big East games from 2005-11 were to just two teams: Syracuse and Pitt. And of the six schools in this CYO parochial group, they account for five of the bottom six in average Verizon Center attendance. Granted, games with Central Florida or Tulane weren't going to reach Syracuse-like proportions, but what is the budget impact if St. John's (average attendance: 8,631) becomes a market leader for a program that has budgeted at 12,000+ a game?

If ticket sales decline, and in any scenario they surely will, there is no sure-fire means of covering that loss. GU lost money in the later Esherick years even averaging 8.431 a game because of the high cost of Verizon. Obviously, thanks to decades of Georgetown whistling past the graveyard of new facilities, there is no Plan B if Georgetown needs a cheaper option than Verizon.

The fourth plank is donor support. For the first thirty years of the Hoya Hoop Club, gifts were solicited as complementary forms of support; i.e., the Hoop Club raised funds for items the University could not budget for. If Georgetown couldn't afford a new floor at Verizon Center (and younger fans may not know that during the entire tenure at Capital Centre from 1981-96, Georgetown played on the Bullets' court design because it could not afford otherwise), the Hoop Club raised funds to make it happen.

In 2006, then-athletic director Bernard Muir reallocated annual gifts to a supplementary model-for the first time, Hoop Club gifts were directly supporting the operating budget. Your annual gifts are no longer a "nice to have", but a "must have", and therein lies the rub-if donors are no longer making a $1,000 gift for seats to watch Butler and Providence, if the supply of seats is so elastic that large gifts are no longer needed, or if, frankly, the donors that bought tickets to sell for the big Syracuse or Louisville games are no longer bound to do so, the drop in giving is a direct hit on the budget. What then?

The final variable, and it's quite variable, is direct University support. That's not a number in the process, but once can say this: if basketball pays its bills, that means there is more University support to pay for the sports that cannot pay for themselves; that is, everyone but men's basketball. If basketball eats up the subsidy, suddenly, these sports are at risk. Outside of football, baseball and sailing, few if any Georgetown sports cover their operating budgets outside of giving, and rely on a subsidy to maintain a program.

That having been said, I offer that:

1. A CYO League as discussed cannot maintain sufficient TV revenue to support men's basketball in the long run.
2. The loss of NCAA tournament credits by leaving the Big East will have a material impact on future cash flow for the program.
3. Any decline in ticket sales, and it is almost assuredly going to happen, will cut into Georgetown's ability to compete.
4. Any decline in annual giving could seriously threaten the viability of needed budget items; and
5. Any degradation of University support, particularly in uncertain economic times, impacts not only basketball but the entire athletic infrastructure at Georgetown.

These are risks that Georgetown must be aware of and must seek to avoid going forward. Nothing among the drawing power of these schools offers hope in this regard. If each of these plans were to decline by a margin of 10%, a loss of $1 million annually must be made up somewhere. The idea that there are gold bricks from the Ewing days hidden in the back of McDonough is a well-worn myth-that money is all gone. Soon too, will be the NCAA credits of a team with one post-season win in the past five years.

And yet, while composing this, my interests are deeply torn by any pending move. As a fan, a donor, and a volunteer I have been part of the Big East experience since the fall of 1980. It is our rightful home and the idea of bottom-feeders like Providence and Seton Hall setting fire to the house for some sort of fool's gold is painful to comprehend. What a tragedy, what a waste.

At first glance, this pending decision left me angry, embarrassed, and fundamentally disappointed in our school's leadership. I could not and would not support an institutional deemphasis of athletics incumbent which this decision, that, as currently reported, will inevitably accomplish. If no one within Georgetown will stand up and say it, I will: an ill-conceived parochial league portends a deemphasis of intercollegiate athletics at Georgetown University.

However, all the numbers I have described and all the risk factors outlined are already well known by these same leaders, in such detail as you or I will never see. There's nothing here that Jack DeGioia, Lee Reed, John Thompson III or others don't know all too well and that, if it took place, would affect them directly. Jack DeGioia has done more for Georgetown University in the last 50 years than anyone since Tim Healy and he is too smart to do something ultimately foolish. Therefore, I trust that Georgetown isn't stupid enough to sign away its basketball birthright because Fr. Harrington at St. John's drank the ESPN kool-aid.

I have long held that there is one conference Georgetown would ever consider moving to if the call arrived: the Ivy League. It must also consider a second alternative.

In 1981, when writing for The HOYA, I once referred to the emerging Big East as "a northern ACC". Three decades later, I was proven right. The Atlantic Coast Conference of my youth is bifurcated with a northern wing of Big East expatriates: Boston College, Syracuse, Pitt, Notre Dame, Louisville, Virginia Tech. At fifteen schools, the ACC is altogether vulnerable from a mirror image of the Big East issue-namely, football-centric schools seeking their own refuge, likely in the underfilled Big 12 conference. Whether or not those plans materialize, a 15 team ACC must consider a 16th team, or others as defections take place.

I will always be loyal to the Big East of my youth, but if the ACC views Georgetown and/or a Georgetown basketball/Navy football combination as a viable answer to the loss of Maryland and the Washington/Baltimore TV market, Georgetown must now take that call.

Yes, there will be those that will dismiss it out of hand over football, but it is not a deal-breaker if the parties deem it so. Yes, there will be those who tout Connecticut or Cincinnati or South Florida as more football-friendly. But none has the location, nor the academics, and none have the brand visibility which Georgetown could provide. With a TV contract estimated at nearly $15 million per team per year, and a range of top opponents that could fill Verizon Center every week (from North Carolina to Syracuse, Duke to Notre Dame, Virginia to Louisville), the upside to Georgetown's financial and competitive balancing act must not go unheeded.

Yes, relations with the exiting parochial schools would certainly sour, much as Georgetown fans felt upon hearing that Syracuse was jumping ship. But in 2011, the USS Big East was merely taking on water. Today, the ship is under water.

Where would Georgetown be were it not for the Big East in 1979? Where will it be going without the best possible decision in 2013?

Maybe Georgetown's expectations must be tempered to a niche player in the basketball firmament, to be thankful to the past and realistic of a limited future without the success enjoyed for so many years. Maybe it is time to dial back our hopes for what intercollegiate athletics is eminently capable of at Georgetown.

But if that phone rings, answer it. Presidential protocol notwithstanding, you can be damned sure that if Georgetown doesn't take the call, someone else will. And that might be the last call for this whole subject.