Can private schools compete?

[SJHooper]

Agreed about the facilities and the other points. St. John's doesn't seem to care about Carnesecca Arena which looks like a high school gym and has the most uncomfortable seats and some of the worst sight lines out of any college arena I've ever been to. Students don't sit behind the basket...they sit about 12 feet above. It's just a weird place that gives you a feel of "this place is nothing special". There are no seatbacks on most of the seats...90% of the arena is hard plastic and metal and 20 somethings leave with their backs aching. If your back aches in your 20's from sitting, you know something's wrong with the seating. It got so bad some games that I had to stand up and watch. The lobby is cool, but the gym is just very standard for a once proud and storied program. It would be nice to get a new arena with more comfortable seating, seatbacks, better views, in more of a bowl format and more ontop of the court. Make the student sections on the side like Duke. Not only will it affect opponents more, but it looks better on TV than 3 rows of students 12 feet above the floor practically out of view and removed from the game.

You would think with famous alumni like Chris Mullin, Mike Francesa, Mark Jackson, Ron Artest, Carnesecca, John Franco, Ray Kelly, Bob Sheppard, etc. that we could pool money to get a great place. I remember when I first came on campus for my 1st year of grad school I was shocked to see how poor the facility was considering SJ was such a storied program in the premier conference in the nation (at the time) and still in one of the best conferences.

[Bill Marsh]

Duke is a private school.

Butler made back-to-back national title games.

Not exactly what you mean here?

If you mean "can a small private school with limited resources win a national title" I would answer that with yes, but there are more hurdles than at Kansas, for instance.

In my opening post, I tried to explain what my concern. It's not so much that there aren't individual private schools who can succeed. There are and they can. It's the steadily decreasing numbers of private schools who are making deep runs into the tournament compared to what was once the case. Postseason success by private schools is becoming rarer and rarer.

Obviously as a Big East fan, my concern is for this particular group of schools although the trend is with regard to private schools in general.

Of course Duke can compete. They are the Harvard of The South. They have enormous resources. Harvard could compete too if they chose to. But these are special situations and not at all typical of the vast array of private schools out there.

While it's true that Butler reached back-to-back championship games just 3 years ago, the real test will be whether they can sustain it beyond just those back-to-back seasons. They are the only private school to have made it to multiple Final Fours since 2005. Unless Dayton, or Stanford, or Baylor makes it to the Final Four this year - something which is highly unlikely - this will make it a decade in which Butler holds that distinction as the only private with multiple FF's. Syracuse. Duke. Villanova, and Georgetown ate the only other privates to make the Final Four even once in this decade. Contrast that with the long list of public schools who have made multiple Final Four runs in the same decade - Louisville, Kentucky, Ohio State, UConn, Michigan State, North Carolina, Kansas, UCLA, & Florida - and Michigan is positioned to become a 10th public on that list.