With Texas Christian University joining the Big East beginning in the 2012-13, the conference has opted to go to an 18-game schedule starting that season.

The women's schedule will be set up so teams will play 14 squads once and will have two home-and-home series annually.

The Big East utilized an 18-game regular season schedule from the 1990-91 to 1998-99 seasons.

"The change in the Conference schedule reflects the growth of Big East women’s basketball,” said Danielle Donehew, Big East Associate Commissioner for women’s basketball. “As the league grows, we need to adapt in order to create the best presentation of our teams and to showcase the depth and talent of our league.”

While Donehew's statement sounds nice, the fact is the move from 16 to 18 games is clearly being done to maximize television exposure. With 17 teams, it would have been easy just to have every team play every conference team once. That would have made for a balanced schedule and the seedings for the Big East tournament would have been done equitably. Now certain teams will be faced with having to play powerhouse programs two additional times which could impact the tournament pairings. The positive aspect of that trade off is that it will aid the RPI of that very team suddenly having to play a UConn, Notre Dame, DePaul or another league power more than once.

With the emergence of the UConn/Notre Dame rivalry, for instance, there's no way the league was going to move from having the national championship contenders play twice during the regular season to meeting just once. So the move to 18 games makes sense.

UConn and Notre Dame will play twice in this upcoming season, the last time there will be a 16-game Big East schedule.