The Big East Conference was founded in 1979 by former athletic director and men's basketball coach Dave Gavitt.

On December 15, 2012, Providence and the other seven Catholic, non-FBS schools announced that they were departing the Big East for a new conference;[2] on March 7, 2013, it was officially confirmed that Providence's new conference would operate under the Big East name.

Former sports include football, which was offered from 1921 until World War II in 1941, and baseball, which was dropped due to Title IX in 1999.

[5] The school's biggest rivals are Boston University and Boston College in hockey and UConn and URI (Ocean State Rivalry) in the school's other sports, especially in soccer, swimming and diving, and basketball.

Philip A. Smith announced that baseball (alongside men's golf and tennis) would be discontinued "in order to comply with gender equity and proportionality strictures" as set by Title IX regulations.

The most recent live dalmatian mascot on campus was Friar Boy V, who died in 2004.

The fans took to it so well that it has become the fight song of the college, with Friar Away slipping into obscurity, other than a brief attempted revival in the 1990s.

All teams compete on campus except for the men's basketball team who play at the Amica Mutual Pavilion in Downtown Providence, Rhode Island (however on rare occasions, the women's basketball team has also played "home" games at the Amica Mutual Pavilion, most notably for games against the University of Rhode Island (URI) in the Ocean State Rivalry or the University of Connecticut (UConn), where demand for tickets would be enough to warrant an arena larger than the 1,854-seat on-campus Alumni Hall.)