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St John's checks in at #87. No other Big East teams yet.

http://www.collegesportsmadness.com/men ... 4-previews

Projected 8th and CBI? Is this a projection from last year? That was last year's expectation. We have the best guards offensively in the conference and I don't think it's anywhere near certain that Marquette, Creighton, Butler, etc. will be better. I think PC is rated very highly but I don't see the star power there. I wouldn't be shocked to see them finish 5th. All it should take is much better defense and slightly above average coaching/development to get this team in the tourney. NIT is absolute bare minimum.

MullinMayhem wrote:Projected 8th and CBI? Is this a projection from last year? That was last year's expectation. We have the best guards offensively in the conference and I don't think it's anywhere near certain that Marquette, Creighton, Butler, etc. will be better. I think PC is rated very highly but I don't see the star power there. I wouldn't be shocked to see them finish 5th. All it should take is much better defense and slightly above average coaching/development to get this team in the tourney. NIT is absolute bare minimum.

You shouldn't be surprised that your team isn't getting respect nationally.

MullinMayhem, you can try to preach how you have the best guards in the conference/country until the cows come home. Obviously nobody in the country sees it the same way as you do, nor does anybody on this board. Stop getting hung up on recruiting rankings. If I have to see a post where you mention 5* Justin Simon one more time I will barf. 5* Justin Simon was no 5* or he wouldn't be transferring. He may be excellent, he may be terrible, but he clearly wasn't a typical 5* guy. I'll take 3* Kyron Cartwright, the second best point guard in the Big East, over Justin Simon.

Onto Providence, clearly your underlying tone in all of your posts regarding preseason rankings is that my guys stink lol. What the hell are you seeing? No star power? The team that finishes 3rd, with a top 3 coach in the conference, losing nobody, and adding a top 15 recruiting class does NOT take a step back in any league lol.

Providence brings back everybody from a team that went to NCAA. Personally I think they should be in top 25.

ST. John's is a very good offensive team but until they play defense like Cooley's teams they are not going anywhere. Play some defense then they are in the discussion for sure and I think they will, I like their talent. The no star power on PC after last year is just silly, this team jelled late in the year and this year the experience will shine through. You can take your rankings, and i will go with experience and proven success and we will go from there.

But if you wanna go by those rankings you love, we have a top 15 recruiting class this year to add on to that experience and bring some pieces that were missing.

MullinMayhem wrote:I think PC is rated very highly but I don't see the star power there. I wouldn't be shocked to see them finish 5th.

I wouldn't be shocked to see the Friars finish first. I would be shocked to see St. John's finish fifth.

Most non-SJU Big East fans probably have the Johhnies finishing in the bottom half. I think that is a testament to the strength of this league rather than taking a shot at the Johnnies.

With the Johnnies at #87, and (surely?) the Blue Demons and Hoyas not in the top 144, we'll almost certainly see 7 more BEASTies previewed on this site in the coming weeks. #87 in the preseason could make the tourney with just a bit of over-achievement relative to expectations, but I want to see how many of our teams are top 50 caliber. I tend to focus on top 50 because those are the teams with serious and legit NCAA tourney aspirations/expectations as the season begins.

FWIW, I'll go with 1 more BEASTie ranked here over #50 (Marquette), and everyone else in the top 50. Actually, I think everyone else will be ranked by at least one knowledgeable source as a top 30 team, but we probably won't see any one set of pre-season rankings with 6 of our teams ranked that high. Whatever the pre-season rankings say, we are clearly continuing to improve as a league, season by season. Gonna be a great year for us BEAST fans. May you all go undefeated in your out-of-conference games!