The beast is back.
After a lackluster inaugural season, Big East conference has reasserted itself as a force to be reckoned with in the world of college basketball. Left for dead by many after the mass exodus of some of conference’s most prestigious members, such as Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Connecticut, Louisville, and Notre Dame, for the greener pastures of big-time football conferences with lucrative television contracts, the Big East has found a way to reinvent and revitalize itself for the better.
In the wake of the realignment buzz that has engulfed major college athletics, the Big East has found a nice niche in a sport that has been otherwise saturated by behemoth conferences with 12 or more teams, where there are large gaps between the playing level of the top teams and the cellar dwellers.
Rather than adopt practices utilized by its peers, the Big East has opted for a more condensed and contrarian structure, with just 10 teams, all of which do not play FBS football. As a result of the 10-team membership, the league has been able to adapt a double round-robin schedule, where each team plays every team in the league once at home and on the road, which in turn has help cultivated new rivalries as well as increase the familiarity of opponents to the league’s fans. And instead of competing for television time with other conferences on ESPN, where in all likelihood only their top two or three teams would be showcased, they chose to sign on with upstart network Fox Sports 1 to have nearly every league game televised, providing equal amount of exposure to all of its members.
But while this setup looked ideal on paper, it all hinged upon the fact that the league’s members would have to deliver on the court, which they did not, at least not last year. Only two teams, Villanova and Creighton, found themselves consistently ranked, and the league barely managed to earn four bids to the NCAA Tournament. No teams advanced past the third round of the tournament and conference brand names such as Georgetown and St. John’s settled for the National Invitation Tournament.
Fast forward to this year, and you have a much more talented league that has been able to take advantage of the Big East’s unique setup. Five teams, Villanova, Butler, Seton Hall, St. John’s, and Georgetown, have been ranked in the Top 25 polls at some point this year. ESPN resident bracketologist projects seven Big East teams will earn selections in March. Based on Ratings Percentage Index, the Big East is the second toughest conference in the country, just behind the Big 12 and ahead of the Big Ten and ACC, leagues that get substantially more attention from the national media due to their cozy relationships with ESPN.
Even without these off-the-court figures, just watch any Big East game. Aside from cellar-dwelling Creighton, almost every team in the conference has two players who can make a legitimate claim for a spot on the All-Big East 1st team. Georgetown has D’Vauntes Smith-Rivera, the Big East Preseason Player of the Year, and arguably the hardest big man to guard one-on-one Joshua Smith. Providence has LaDontae Henton, who leads the league in scoring averaging 20.4 points per game, and Kris Dunn, who leads the league in assists with 7.4 per game. St. John’s has one of the best defensive players in the country with Chris Obekpa, the league leader in blocks, to accompany scoring machine D’Angelo Harrison. The entire Villanova starting lineup could make a case for a spot on the all-league team as well.
But while the relationship with Fox Sports 1 has allowed those who follow the conference closely, like myself, to fall in love with it even more due to its wall-to-wall coverage of every game, the fact that the conference does not play its games on ESPN anymore has helped fuel this notion that, in terms of quality of play, the Big East remains much inferior to its ACC and Big Ten counterparts. Just tune into highlight shows such as SportsCenter or even college basketball-dedicated programming such as College GameDay. You would not hear much about any of the teams and players I just mentioned. In fact, you would probably think the Big East did not even exist anymore due the paucity of attention it receives.
Simply put, you cannot write off the Big East as a glorified mid-major conference anymore. The country needs to start to paying attention. But as the season draws to a close, and the NCAA Tournament inches nearer, the league must take advantage of their successful season so far by having multiple teams make deep runs in the Tournament. Only then will the doubters be able to say that the Big East is back.
