The Big 5 is now officially more like the City Six, with the Philadelphia basketball community officially welcoming Drexel as part of a restructuring of the City Series in an announcement Tuesday. The traditional series, dating back to 1955, included Penn, Temple, Saint Joseph’s, Villanova and La Salle.
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Under the new plan, set to debut in 2024, the six city Division I schools will play in two pods of three teams. Temple, La Salle and Drexel make up one pod; Villanova, Penn and Saint Joseph’s are the second pod.
The podded teams will play one another during the month of November. The pod winners will be matched up in a Big 5 championship game on Dec. 2 at the Wells Fargo Center, the headliner in a tripleheader in which the second- and third-place pod finishers will complete the afternoon of games.
To traditionalists, it will be a gut punch. No more round robin. No more Palestra. But it is at least an imperfect solution to a very complicated problem that will preserve the concept of city collegiality and spirit that represents the heart of the Big 5. The reality is, it has not felt the same for years, the games are saddled with sagging attendance and waning interest. Without a restructuring, the whole thing could have easily died. The games have long vacated the Palestra, with schools opting for on-campus site advantages, and the original Big 5 schools now represent four different conferences — the Ivy League (Penn), the Big East (Villanova), the American Athletic Conference (Temple) and the Atlantic 10 (Saint Joseph’s and La Salle).
Marrying the inherent scheduling conflicts amid league expansion and other required games — the Big East/Big 12 Challenge for example — often meant shoehorning Big 5 games in wherever they fit, detracting from the importance of the games. It didn’t help that Villanova also won all or at least a part of eight of the last nine men’s titles, running roughshod over the competition.
Many feared that, without a serious shakeup, the entire Big 5 would disappear. Last year athletic directors came together to try and find a creative way to reinvent the series, ultimately agreeing on a sort of showcase event.
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