Knee jerk reactions on your team

[Bill Marsh]

love the exposure and $$$ from the Big East, just don't think the basketball is a great improvement.

I admire your loyalty to your roots even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

[Bill Marsh]

MU's defense is probably one of the best in the league... MU's offense is terrible. Unless Mayo or Wilson start killin it then we'll finish 3rd in the conference and either lose in the round of 64 or 32. This team reminds me of Georgetown's team last year with stellar D and major scoring issues.

Deleted.

[xu1990]

love the exposure and $$$ from the Big East, just don't think the basketball is a great improvement.

I admire your loyalty to your roots even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I guess to be clear I wasn't speaking of the old big east. what I was saying is this:

Creighton
Xavier
Butler
VCU
Temple
UMASS
Saint Louis

vs

Gtown
Marq
Nova
St J
Hall
PC
DePaul


Not trying to put down the new league, love that we are in, just find the talk from fans of St J, Hall, PC, Nova etc that the new schools will have to step up their play night in and night out... to be pretty funny. Been playing better teams than the remaining 7 BE schools for a while.

[Dart87]

I agree, it's a really good thing that the new schools are all very good because they are going to have to bring it every night for over 2 months. Not doubting they will, but each of them is going to reach a point in their schedule where they say wtf have we gotten ourselves into. It has and continues to happen to all of us. Welcome to the Big East!

One factor in favor of the new schools is that they have been the team circled on each of their league opponents' schedule. X was the team most A-10 teams used as a highlight game when they came to town, i.e. the largest crowds, national TV, white-out, pink-out etc.,amped up players and fans. So yes, X; Butler; and Creighton have had to "bring it" every night because they were getting the "best game" from their opponents.

The current Big East teams may have seen some of that but I suspect Syracuse, UCon, and Louisville received most of it in the old Big East. I believe this prepared these teams for more success in the NCAA as they play high energy games at each arena they visited.

The home and home nature of the current big east will develop rivalries among all of the schools and hopefully make every game a bit more intense.

[Bill Marsh]

love the exposure and $$$ from the Big East, just don't think the basketball is a great improvement.

I admire your loyalty to your roots even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I guess to be clear I wasn't speaking of the old big east. what I was saying is this:

Creighton
Xavier
Butler
VCU
Temple
UMASS
Saint Louis

vs

Gtown
Marq
Nova
St J
Hall
PC
DePaul


Not trying to put down the new league, love that we are in, just find the talk from fans of St J, Hall, PC, Nova etc that the new schools will have to step up their play night in and night out... to be pretty funny. Been playing better teams than the remaining 7 BE schools for a while.

First of all, if you're going to compare the C7 schools that you will now be playing to 7 teams that Creighton, Butler, or Xavier were playing in the A10, then you have to include an 8th team on your A10 list because those schools weren't playing themselves.

Second, those A10 schools weren't all good at the same time in the recent past. Yes, they had some good years but they also had some bad years.

But the biggest thing you're overlooking is that the C7 schools who have struggled over the past decade did so in the context of a brutal Big East schedule which automatically made their records look bad. Put them in the A10 with automatic wins against Fordham, St. Bonaventure, Duquesne, etc. and we'd be having a different conversation. There were absolutely no wins like that in the Big East. Even the worst of the C7 were better than they appeared and showed it at times with break through seasons like St. John's 3rd place BE finish in 2011, Seton Hall's 2 trips to the tournament in the past 10 years, which included a win over Arizona. That's no less than some of the A10 teams you're touting have done. Seton Hall went 8-10 in the BE and won 21 games 2 years ago. They were 9-9 in the BE in 2010. PC was 10-8 in 2009 and 8-8 in 2007. These SH and PC teams were really good teams. They would have been top teams in the A10, but they were also-rans in the BE and no one ever heard of them. Just ask DePaul how tough it is in the BE. They were one of the top teams in a really good CUSA conference before they came into the Big East. They even went 9-7 against Big East competition in 2007, but they were simply overwhelmed by more powerful programs. Once a program like Depaul fell to the bottom of the league, they were stuck because it was just too big a mountain to climb with so many programs to climb over. It's one of the reasons why I don't like big conferences. The bigger they are, the harder it is to have teams recover from bad seasons and climb back up to the top.

Providence is a perfect case study. They finished with a .500 record in the Big East last year, tied with Cincinnati, an NCAA tournament team, yet no one noticed them. They went tot he NIT and immediately knocked off Charlotte, one of the A10's better teams. Annually they have come up with major upsets of top teams:

2013 - #17 Cincinnati, #21 Notre Dame
2012 - #14 Louisville (Final Four team)
2011 - #8 Villanova, #19 Louisville
2010 - #19 UConn
2009 - #1 Pitt, #15 Syracuse
2008 - #13 UConn
2007 - #15 Marquette, #22 West Virginia

Yet all you would hear from C7 critics is that Providence hasn't done anything in recent years, that they've flat out sucked. In fact, Providence killed their OOC schedule most years, but they just couldn't win against the best of the Big East consistently. But can anyone say that the A10 schools you listed were capable of beating schools of the caliber I listed year after year? And can anyone honestly say that a program capable of those kinds of wins was really a bad program?

You guys who weren't playing in the Big East really have no comprehension of the level of competition that the schools in that league brought. That's not a criticism of you or anyone else. It's hard to appreciate it unless you lived through it. A .500 team from the big East won the national championship 3 years ago and killed everyone else they played OOC. But they were middle of the pack in the Big East during the regular season.

One of the things I think we're going to see in this new league is just how good, St. John's, Providence, Seton Hall, and even DePaul really were, that they were never as bad as everyone said.

[XUFan09]

Here's the breakdown of how the Big East is clearly better than the A10, in terms of Kenpom rankings.

http://fromstaaktomack.wordpress.com/20 ... -a-debate/

[anXUfan]

The Big East is what it is, which by all objective measures is a damned good league. All of its members, new and old, have the opportunity to earn the others' respect by playing well and winning. No hypotheticals or rhetoric required.

[anXUfan]

Here's the breakdown of how the Big East is clearly better than the A10, in terms of Kenpom rankings.

http://fromstaaktomack.wordpress.com/20 ... -a-debate/

I thought this was a pretty good read.

Also, while it's very early, the Big East is sitting at #2 in Ken Pomeroy's ratings, behind the Big 10 and ahead of the ACC.

[XUFan09]

Here's the breakdown of how the Big East is clearly better than the A10, in terms of Kenpom rankings.

http://fromstaaktomack.wordpress.com/20 ... -a-debate/

I thought this was a pretty good read.

Also, while it's very early, the Big East is sitting at #2 in Ken Pomeroy's ratings, behind the Big 10 and ahead of the ACC.

Thanks! I just noticed some screwups from writing it back in March, so now it's edited and a cleaner read.

[FriarJ]

Well I guess Xavier fans have earned the right to be cocky with all their final four appearances. My point this conference will test you every night. Their point? We had it tougher before. Whatever...