Welcome to The Holy Land of Hoops

My first thought was Creighton and Xavier as they have been very competitive in conference and nationally. Providence and Seton Hall also have an argument tho. The biggest losers are easy, Georgetown and Marquette.

You can take Marquette out of the negative discussion, based on now having Shaka, what they accomplished last year (BE Champ), and how they're set up for moving forward.

Creighton and Xavier have clearly benefited from joining the conference and the conference has benefited from having them.

Providence, in particular, flourished, coming out from under the old structure.

Butler needs to find its footing for the long-term.

Winners: Villanova, Creighton, Xavier
Losers: Georgetown and Marquette (Pre Shaka)

Losers are Us and Georgetown. 9/11 NCAA tournaments including a FF, E8, 2 S16s. Constant NBA players, coming off a Big East Regular season championship, ranked preseason and picked first. Vander leaves, Duane's injured, McKay leaves, Buzz craps the bed then leaves and trashed our (and the conference) potential moving forward.

Georgetown has almost exactly the same story only they fired JT3 instead of him crapping on the school and conference.

As great as Markus was it's painful to see how quickly Shaka righted the ship with 5 of Wojo's guys in yr 1 and 3 in yr 2, and makes you realize how horrific of a coach he was. Let it be a lesson for all of you, you're not too big to fail.

Every successful program is one bad hire away from setting a program back years. Thankfully, with NIL/Transfer Portal, the right coach can change things around in a hurry. MU losing Buzz AND hiring Wojo was a huge misfire; hiring Shaka (when it almost did in 2014) righted so many wrongs. Georgetown moving on from JTIII was the right call, but hiring Ewing (a coach with zero HC or collegiate experience) was a disaster. We will see what Cooley can bring.

Winners: Creighton, Xavier, Villanova, Seton Hall and Providence (and UConn, clearly)
Losers: Georgetown, Marquette, St. John's and DePaul

Butler is kind of in between; they have had some success and they have had some bad years too. They need more consistency (hopefully, Matta still has it in him).

Creighton

It's gotta be Creighton, Xavier and Butler, right? Butler hasn't quite had the level of success the other 2 have yet, but reality is that that the change in conference affiliation raised the ceiling (and really, probably the floor as well) for all of them.

Villanova, Providence and Seton Hall benefited somewhat as well as they were able to raise their level of play (Nova from mid-high to championship level, PC and SH from largely buried to mid-high with a couple conference championships) but an argument could be made that their timing was coincidental (the only recruiting boost offered would be the decline of some former rivals). For example, it would be silly to suggest a Nova team good enough to win a natty wouldn't have been good enough to win the old Big East. PC and SHU may not have gotten their Big East banners in the old league, but I expect they still would've been solidly in for their NCAA tournament bids. Even if they were a little farther down the standings, that league was consistently putting 8-10 teams in the dance.

I'd say Creighton and it's not very close.

From a creighton fan's perspective -- I think most of us online fanatics perceived our program as the weakest of the invitees. We were very worried about the 3rd invite going to Dayton or SLU. Butler had recently made their deep runs in the tournament and Xavier had been a quality program going back to the early 00s. Creighton was a big fish in a small pond with very little success in the tournament. Our recruiting was bad -- the end of Altman's tenure (spring 2010) was a particularly low point if I remember correctly.

Then we got into the BE and we were lucky to have a highly experienced roster with the NPOY. That early success helped us elevate our recruiting immediately. We brought in quality transfers who could see the potential for success (Watson, Huff, Foster). Then we leveraged that success to improve our high school recruiting. Now, instead of hoping that a kid chooses between us and Georgia Tech, we're competing against legit power conference schools and we have the expectation of being a top 25 team every season. The program is light-years ahead of where it was a decade ago.

I understand the sentiment for CU and XU, but I would make the case for Villanova and UConn. I'm not sure that Jay Wright wins two national titles if he wasn't in the reconfigured Big East. And I know beyond any certainty, that UConn would not have won a natty without rejoining the league.

I really think the case for Seton Hall and Providence is being underrated. My understanding is that both schools were effective bottom feeders in the OBE. In the NBE they have been near or in the tournament almost every year.