The Holy Land of Hoops

I'm not an ESPN insider so I don't have access to the whole Goodman article, but this is getting a little old as ESPN tries to discredit the Big East every chance they get. Yes we lost some good schools but we trimmed the fat to basically nothing and have the best basketball-centric 10 team league in America. We'll be lucky to get a handful of teams in the NCAA? How about around 50% of the league?

Realignment. We all know it was football-driven, but it had plenty of impact on college hoops. The Big East, as we knew it, is gone. The American Athletic Conference was born from realignment and looks fairly strong -- for now. (Louisville will leave in 2014.)

The new, all-powerful ACC can raise its hand as the clear-cut victor of realignment, adding Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame this season and Louisville next season.

But who are the losers?

With college basketball around the corner -- practice begins in less than a month -- it’s time to take a look at the conferences that took the biggest hit via realignment.

1. Big East

Just two seasons ago, the league sent a record 11 teams to the NCAA tournament. It had eight teams in the field in 2006, 2008 and 2010. Now it’ll be lucky to get a handful. The new-look Big East has 10 members, and it’s a basketball-centric conference. Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame left for the ACC, and Louisville, UConn, Cincinnati, South Florida and Rutgers will also head into the American Athletic Conference.

The good news is that there isn’t much disparity from the top team, whatever it may be this season, and the seventh or eighth team in the league. Xavier, Creighton and Butler were added, but the Bulldogs will take a significant hit with the departure of Brad Stevens to the NBA and the loss of key player Roosevelt Jones. The Bluejays have a chance to win the league this season, but will they remain contenders in the post-Doug McDermott era?

Fox is going to enjoy smacking ESPN around. Especially for hoops season.

Having a bit of a twitter-war with Goodman as we speak.

admin wrote:I'm not an ESPN insider so I don't have access to the whole Goodman article, but this is getting a little old as ESPN tries to discredit the Big East every chance they get. Yes we lost some good schools but we trimmed the fat to basically nothing and have the best basketball-centric 10 team league in America. We'll be lucky to get a handful of teams in the NCAA? How about around 50% of the league?

Realignment. We all know it was football-driven, but it had plenty of impact on college hoops. The Big East, as we knew it, is gone. The American Athletic Conference was born from realignment and looks fairly strong -- for now. (Louisville will leave in 2014.)

The new, all-powerful ACC can raise its hand as the clear-cut victor of realignment, adding Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame this season and Louisville next season.

But who are the losers?

With college basketball around the corner -- practice begins in less than a month -- it’s time to take a look at the conferences that took the biggest hit via realignment.

1. Big East

Just two seasons ago, the league sent a record 11 teams to the NCAA tournament. It had eight teams in the field in 2006, 2008 and 2010. Now it’ll be lucky to get a handful. The new-look Big East has 10 members, and it’s a basketball-centric conference. Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame left for the ACC, and Louisville, UConn, Cincinnati, South Florida and Rutgers will also head into the American Athletic Conference.

The good news is that there isn’t much disparity from the top team, whatever it may be this season, and the seventh or eighth team in the league. Xavier, Creighton and Butler were added, but the Bulldogs will take a significant hit with the departure of Brad Stevens to the NBA and the loss of key player Roosevelt Jones. The Bluejays have a chance to win the league this season, but will they remain contenders in the post-Doug McDermott era?

Ignore them. It's an idiotic article. They acknowledged that the conference can expect to get "a handful" of teams in. A handful is 5. That's a big deal for a 10 member league.

I don't disagree with Goodman, depending on what he means by handful. The Big East from last year to this year did take a significant drop, how many of us from the seven wouldn't prefer that the Big East had not fallen apart? It's true we don't have a blue blood anchor, Georgetown is a little short and suffering a tad in image because of their recent flame outs. They're the best we got, to go with a healthy dose of solid programs Anyone who focuses on ranking conferences weighted to the top teams should rank us lower than anyone that looks at the whole of a conference.

If his handful means 6, then yeah, we'd be lucky to land that many in the field. If he meant lucky to get 3, then sure, he's being a bit negative, less than 3 would be an outright disaster.

It's sad that college basketball analysts mostly from ESPN are trying to tear down a league that finally puts "basketball first." You would think they would celebrate the creation of a league where basketball trumps football.

yorost wrote:I don't disagree with Goodman, depending on what he means by handful. The Big East from last year to this year did take a significant drop, how many of us from the seven wouldn't prefer that the Big East had not fallen apart? It's true we don't have a blue blood anchor, Georgetown is a little short and suffering a tad in image because of their recent flame outs. They're the best we got, to go with a healthy dose of solid programs Anyone who focuses on ranking conferences weighted to the top teams should rank us lower than anyone that looks at the whole of a conference.

If his handful means 6, then yeah, we'd be lucky to land that many in the field. If he meant lucky to get 3, then sure, he's being a bit negative, less than 3 would be an outright disaster.

I agree that the conference has lost prestige. You can't lose programs of the caliber of Louisville, UConn, and Syracuse and not take a hit. However going from being the best conference to one of the top 3 or 4 is not a big drop.

The individual programs now in the Big East are far better off even if the conference itself has dropped a couple of notches. Too many of the Catholic schools were drowning in that bloated monstrosity of 16 members with the threat of adding even more. There was too much negative publicity with the football schools far too often blaming their own problems on the non-football schools.

The football schools are better off in many ways in their new homes, but I'm not sure that their basketball wil be as well off. They are now 2nd class citizens in someone else's league. And the new leagues face the same problems that the old BE had. They're just too big and once a team falls to the 2nd division, it's just too far to go to climb back up. UNC,Duke,Louisville, and Syracuse can't all be Final Four teams at the same time. Someone is going to suffer. Rutgers is going to become the whipping boy for the Big Ten. West Virginia is better off in the 10 team Big XII, but they're a geographic isolate and that football league will always be Texas, Oklahoma, and everyone else. Maybe their basketball can Robin to Kansas' Batman, but that league has begun to take basketball seriously, so it will be a very competitive situation. It was really the only viable option for them, but they paid a steep price by aligning themselves with a league half way across the country.

This article is more about ESPiN attacking Fox Sports than explaining how cuse, pitt & nd playing conference tourny games down south makes them the victors from a bball perspective.

@Bill Marsh: Significant drop, not big drop. Going from frequently being in the discussion for best conference in basketball to that probably becoming a rare to never occurrence is a significant drop, there's a clear difference in quality. Projecting our set of teams back the last ~15 years never gets us better than 3rd best conference via Sagarin.

admin wrote:Having a bit of a twitter-war with Goodman as we speak.

"@PeteXU @HolyLandofHoops I could care less about that. Has no bearing on my opinion. It's not the league it used to be. That's a fact."

https://twitter.com/GoodmanESPN/status/374994882924134400

If you work at ESPiN it's clear you're expected to fall in line...