Is the league underrated?
As conference tourney kicks off, national standing a question
After the Uconn men's basketball team inflicted revenge on Providence, the head coaches on both sides entered the postgame press conference with moods that covered both ends of the spectrum.
Ed Cooley was disappointed in the way his Friars played in the second half — and for good reason. Providence's largest lead that day was four points just past the midway point in the first half, but the Friars kept it close, trailing by just five at the break. . But in the second half, the sold-out Gampel Pavilion crowd, wearing white for Senior Night, ramped up, giggly off a few $2 beers and conscious of the way everything went down when the home court was reversed. Uconn took advantage of Providence's — to use Cooley's phrase — “BS effort” in the second half, where it was “boys against men,” to win the game by 18 points, 87-69.
Dan Hurley was thrilled with his team's toughness and a return to its “identity” of elite defense and dominant rebounding; the Huskies had a 40-20 advantage on the boards and scored 15 secondchance points. He used the word formidable to describe his Uconn group, with strong reason to believe they'd snapped out of their January funk and returned to playing like one of the best teams in college basketball.
Twenty seconds into Cooley's statement he said, “The Big East is so underrated.”
It took Hurley about four minutes before he reached the same conclusion: “This league is just … No. 1, it's underrated.”
Both coaches referenced the difficulty of winning on the road in the league, where the top five teams compiled a 74-9 record on their home courts over the full
season. They each mentioned the quality of coaching, the passion of the fans and the physicality in the league, top to bottom.
“The top five of this league is as good as any top five in the country,” Hurley said.
The Big East is rated as the fourthbest conference in the country by Kenpom, and has four teams in the Top 25 of the NCAA’S NET rankings, which are ultimately used to determine NCAA Tournament seeding. Only the Big 12 (six teams) and the SEC (five) have more schools ranked in the NET Top 25. Meanwhile, the Big Ten, which is projected by ESPN’S Joe Lunardi to get 10 teams into the tournament, counts Purdue as its only representative.
Is the Big East underrated?
According to Teamrankings. com, which uses the Rating Percentage Index (RPI) that was used by the NCAA before it began using the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) in 2018, the Big East is ranked fifth behind the Big 12, SEC, Big Ten and Mountain West this season.
There were three Big East teams ranked in the AP Top 25 at this point last season (Villanova, Providence and Uconn). With all of the parity in college basketball this season, the conference had four teams represented in the AP rankings Monday – Uconn is the only program that was ranked at this point in both years.
“It feels like there is more talent in the league and potentially multiple draft picks in the league, which obviously we’re the only program I think the last two years to have players drafted,” Hurley said Feb. 28.
As far as national player recognition goes, there were no Big East representatives among the Top 15 John R. Wooden Award finalists, though there were eight nominees from the Big East spread out among the finalist lists for the five positional awards given out by the Basketball Hall of Fame.
“This is a brutal league, man. It doesn’t get enough credit,” Hurley said after Uconn’s regular season concluded with a fifth in-conference road win over Villanova March 4. “We don’t get the promotion across the board, the league doesn’t get the credit for how good the league is and how tough the league is and how hard it is to win on the road in this league.”
Part of that goes back to the “new “Big East being a basketball-first conference, with Uconn the only member school that has its football team competing at the Division I FBS level.
“While football in this country is a force,” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman said at the conference’s Media Day in October, “basketball is the connective tissue that binds all sports, so we plan to work with all our colleagues in Division I to make sure that basketball, both men’s and women’s, has its own growth and management strategies apart from football.”
While Uconn’s independent football team is on the rise, it is nowhere near the level of the Big 12 programs, the SEC or even the Big Ten (which also doesn’t have a media rights deal with ESPN – one of the arguments for why the Big East feels underrated).
“Look, it’s a basketball conference and the games aren’t games in that conference, they’re events,” ESPN college basketball analyst Seth Greenberg told The Courant. “You’re talking about really rich-tradition programs that basketball is important in terms of their history, basketball is important to their student body and their alumni. And you see that in the resources they pour into the programs and the energy and the crowds that they get — the games are unbelievable.
“The problem is, we live in a culture of college athletics where college football permeates the mindset of the average fan,” Greenberg continued. “They tell us once the national football championship’s over, we’ve got to reset, we’ve got to reintroduce ourselves to the viewing audience — but to the basketball fan? If a basketball fan would look at the Big East they’d say it’s never been better — well, obviously way back in the day — but the league is in a very, very good place right now. The games aren’t games, they’re events. And it’s a physical, well-coached, hard-playing league and if you don’t play well you don’t have a chance to win.”
Uconn’s back, and so are some others
Uconn has the third-best in-conference record since it rejoined the Big East ahead of the 2020-21 season.
This season, when conference play came around, Uconn was in the midst of its best start to a season since it began the 1998-99 campaign at 19-0, eventually claiming the program’s first-ever national championship that year. The Huskies carried a No. 2 NET ranking into conference play, making every game against Uconn a designated Quad 1 game for the opponent. Uconn went 14-0 before its first loss.
“We won the nonconference season, either us or Purdue did,” Hurley said. “But the league is tough … I think we got multiple teams — the teams that are gonna get bids to the NCAA Tournament could all win games. I think that the league, we’ve all really toughened each other up.”
The story of the Big East this season is regular-season champion Marquette, which has landed head coach Shaka Smart in potential national coach of the year conversations. The Golden Eagles came into the season with plenty of unknowns and were picked to finish ninth in the preseason coaches’ poll, but Smart got the most out of his players and the team finished 17-3 in conference.
“I’ve always felt like the Big Ten is the best-scouted conference in college basketball, I think they do a great job scouting, I think that the Big 12 obviously has had a great year, but the Big East takes a backseat to no one,” Greenberg said. “I mean, you’re talking about potential Hall of Fame coaches in this league.”
That’s the case despite losing a Hall of Famer in former Villanova head coach Jay Wright. New to the league this year are Xavier’s Sean Miller and Butler’s Thad Matta, who both bring a wealth of experience.
“If you think about way back in the day, that’s what it was. I think that the traditions of the league have not changed, the tenants that make the league what it is, there’s a commonality within that league. Uconn’s a little bit on the outside because it’s obviously the only state university, but they’re deeply invested in the tradition of the Big East,” Greenberg said. “Back then the Big East was as good as any conference and right now the way the league is, it’s as good as any conference. Right now the league, to me, is a basketball-only, put your hard hat on, well-coached, terrific players, high-energy, Madison Square Garden for the Tournament, every-game-is an-event league.”
The Big 12 this year, and in recent history, has been the deepest college basketball conference in the nation, from first-place Kansas to last-place Oklahoma. Could the new Big East have a similar presence from top to bottom?
“Yeah, I think it can and it should,” Greenberg said. “Because every one of those programs has done it in the past. Every program in the Big East at one time, they were an elite program. At one time they were a program that was competing for a national championship. Whether it was Depaul, whether it was St. John’s, whether it was Georgetown – they have been programs that are synonymous with the highest level of success in college basketball. There’s no reason why every one of those schools can’t get back there.”