Big East: How good will it be this season?

Ready or not, here comes Big East play!

UConn’s Big East opener, scheduled for Friday, has been postponed. The Huskies are slated to play at Georgetown on Sunday, Dec. 13, and that game hasn’t been postponed or canceled yet. If the Georgetown game is played, it will be the Huskies first Big East game since March 9, 2013 — an overtime win over Providence before a Gampel sellout.

So what type of league is UConn returning to?

Better than the American Athletic Conference, the league in which UConn played the past seven seasons? Without a doubt, though the Big East currently has just one more ranked team than the AAC (No. 9 Creighton and No. 12 Villanova; No. 10 Houston).

Better than last year’s Big East? Probably not. The Big East was the No. 1 league in the nation last season, per NET and RPI rankings. The league would likely have had six or seven NCAA tournament bids before the tourney was canceled due to COVID-19. It would be hard for the Big East to match or surpass that this season.

Better than the Big East the Huskies left in 2013? Well, that league had eight NCAA tournament bids, and that’s not happening this season. But that 2012-13 Big

East featured not only UConn but Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Notre Dame, Cincinnati, Rutgers and South Florida. All would be out of the league the next season, for various reasons. They would be replaced by Xavier, Creighton and Butler. And, this season, UConn.

The league has done just fine without UConn the past seven seasons. It averaged 5.3 NCAA tourney bids per season from 201419, with a high of seven in 2017. Villanova won the whole thing in 2016 and 2018. And the new guys have been very competitive. Here’s the conference records of Big East teams the past seven seasons:

1. Villanova, 103-23; 2. Xavier,

Getty Images UConn was supposed to play its first Big East game in seven years on Friday against St. John’s.