Nothing comes easy in Big East
Huskies face another dangerous opponent in Golden Eagles
The UConn men are fighting to make their postseason hopes happen. Their Saturday opponent, Marquette, will be trying to do that later, in the Big East Tournament.
Therein was the making of coach Dan Hurley’s message to the Huskies this week.
“It’s a weird dynamic this time of year,” Hurley said, “when teams are aware of their bubble existence or playing near the bubble,. When they play a team that is not necessarily in that position, where the team that isn’t necessarily playing for at-large bid is looser and playing more free. We just can’t allow that to happen, we have to attack the game, because we’re trying to make the season. We’re not defending the season.”
The Huskies (11-6, 8-6 in the Big East), on the NCAA Tournament bubble with three games to go, played tight on offense for a stretch at GeorgetownonTuesday, butloosenedupandwongoingaway. They’ll be facing an especially dangerous and undervalued opponent in Marquette (11-12, 6-10) at Gampel Pavilion on Saturday at 2:30 p.m.
When North Carolina tried to squeeze in an out-of-conference game this week, they found the
wrong opponent in Marquette, which had beaten Wisconsin earlier in the season. The Golden Eagles went to Chapel Hill and stunned the Tar Heels 83-70 on Wednesday.
“Well, if I’d have known we were going to lose, God Almighty, I wouldn’t have scheduled the thing,” UN C coach Roy Williams told reporters after the game .“If you’ d have told me we were going to beat the Lake rs, I’d have scheduled them .”
Big East coaches could’ve have warned Williams of the risks. The pandemic wreaked havoc on the schedule in November and December, limiting the ability to play out-of-conference games and making it more complicated to accurately assess conference strength. The Big East’s 11 schools played a disparate number, some getting seven nonconference games, others as few as two.
But in the games that were played, the Big East has shown its traditional strength, going 42-15 out of conference, including 11-10 against Power 5 foes, which includes Seton Hall’s one-point loss at Louisville and Creighton’s one-point loss to Kansas. Villanova grabbed any game it could while in the Mohegan Sun bubble and perhaps overextended itself with a loss to Virginia Tech, but got early season wins over Boston College,
Arizona State and Texas. Xavier is 7-0 in nonconference games, with wins over Oklahoma and Cincinnati. The Huskies (3-0) got a highvalue win over Southern Cal at Mohegan Sun.
“This is a heck of a league, when you look at what Marquette did the other night,” Hurley said. “They didn’t just go on the road and steal one. From tip to finish, they dominated the game against one of the best teams in the ACC that was playing for their NCAA life.”
The Huskies were 43rd in NCAA NetRanking on Friday afternoon, as nine of the Big East’s 11 schools were in the top 100, and No. 32 in the influential Ken Pomeroy power rankings. After Villanova and Creighton, locks for the NCAA Tournament, UConn and Seton Hall (53rd in Net), who play each other in Newark, N.J., next Wednesday, are contenders to secure bids before the Big East Tournament begins March 10. Warren Nolan’s metrics rate the Big East as fifth among conferences in NetRanking, behind the Big Ten, ACC, SEC and Big 12, ahead of the Pac 12.
Asked howmany Big East teams could make a legit tournament case, Hurley thought for only a second.
“Six,” he said. “I think there are six teams that have proven themselves as NCAAcaliber. Wehaven’t been able to, as a league, because of the differences in how COVID has been handled, we didn’t get the nonconference games to fatten up our record so we could manipulate the Net a little bit.”
Villanova, Creighton, UConn, Seton Hall, Xavier and St. John’s are the top six Big East teams in the NetRanking.
The Huskies didn’t need to watch Marquette’s win at UNC to know what they’re up against. The Golden Eagles were beating UConn by 18 points early in the second half in Milwaukee on Jan. 5, before UConn got a barrage of 3-pointers from Tyler Polley and rallied to win, 65-54.
In that game, freshman forward Dawson Garcia had 20 points and 11 rebounds, but was less effective after the Huskies began keeping him from catching the ball in the spots he liked.
“They outplayed us in the first half and the first several minutes of the second half,” Hurley said. “We expect to see the team that was up 18 on us and pounded North Carolina .”