Cuse Country

Syracuse has reached the dizzying heights once again in the new Coaches poll, sliding into the #9 perch — one spot higher than predicted thanks to a jump over a certain team from Washington, DC. I’m sure at least one blog will take note of that. In the AP poll, we moved up to the tantalizing #11 spot.

In other news, my dreams for the Big East have been realized in both polls. West Virginia and Marquette picked good weeks to surge, and Louisville picked a good week to hang on by the skin of its teeth (nice win over Kentucky yesterday afternoon) — and now our esteemed conference has set a record that will likely never be broken: 9 ranked teams at once. Both the AP and Coaches poll are on board. In the Coaches, in fact, the Big East controls 9 of the top 22 spots. Either way, the league now owns 36% of the top 25. That doesn’t exactly leave a lot of breathing room for the five other major conferences or the five to six mid-major conferences that are used to having at least one of their teams hovering around the rankings.

The only mitigating factor is that the one conference putting up any kind of a fight this year is — of course — the Godless ACC. In fact, the new poll has the ACC taking control of the #2, #3, and #4 spots in both polls, bracketed by Pitt at #1 and UConn at #5. This was predictable but is still annoying. The ACC also has an undefeated Clemson lurking at #11/#12, and newcomer Boston College riding the strength of its UNC upset to #17/#24. No other conference is even trying to compete (no one else has more than 3 teams, the Pac-10 has just two, and the SEC in has just the lonely Tennessee, desperately clinging to 25th place in the Coaches poll; oh how the mighty have fallen).

The mid-majors are getting squeezed out as well. There were a bunch of “Year of the Mid-Major” in the early and mid 2000’s, but this isn’t shaping up to be one. Powerhouse pseudo mid-majors like Memphis and Gonzaga have already been bounced from the rankings — and only Xavier remains from the Big Three. Among true mid-majors, only Butler appears in the rankings, with ingenue Davidson long since kicked to the curb. Great teams like Dayton, St. Mary’s, Illinois St, and UNLV are knocking on the door, but there’s just no room this year. The Big East is sucking up all the oxygen. We’ve reached the plateau for the league though — at no point this year will there be dominance any greater than right now.