Cuse Country

Just a moment here to reflect on the early-season success of the Big East basketball conference as a whole. Our resident conference comparer is in China, and although he has been checking in as best he can, he doesn’t have a Thanksgiving holiday weekend during which he can incessantly blog about college basketball. I, on the other hand, to my great joy and gratitude, not to mention the benefit of my mental health, do.

The prevailing storyline in the preseason was that “The Big East lost a lot of top talent and thus will not be nearly as good this year.” Most season previews were more or less variations on that theme; here’s one standard example. But as a wise man once said, this is why you play the games. Including Tuesday night’s games, the Big East has a cumulative record of 58-5. The five losses: Pitt lost tonight to #3 Texas; Rutgers fell to Vermont by 6; Providence lost on the road at Alabama; USF got nipped by South Carolina by three points; and DePaul — picked to finish last in the conference, 0-18 in the Big East last season — lost to #10 Tennessee by only 4 points and have yet to let an opponent reach 60.

Meanwhile, seven Big East teams are ranked in this week’s AP Top 25. We all know what Syracuse did to the preseason favorites in the ACC and Pac-10. But also: Villanova won the Puerto Rico Tip-Off Classic. Cincinnati — picked by the BE coaches to finish seventh in the conference — just beat #24 Vanderbilt and #21 Maryland on consecutive nights in Maui and gets a shot at Gonzaga in the championship game of that tournament Wednesday night. The ACC haters out there (and if you read this blog, you know that we are among them) should note that the Big East is now 3-0 against the Godless Ones; in addition to SU over UNC and Cincy over MD, South Florida knocked off Virginia in a battle of basement types.

We also have to grant that some of the wins are not so spectacular. St John’s for instance, is 3-0 but only beat St Bonaventure by 1 and Brown by 3. Still, the overall strength of the league is evident once again. It will be nearly impossible for the Big East, or any conference for that matter, to duplicate the dominance of the 08-09 season in which three of the four #1 NCAA seeds came from one conference, and during which 9 teams were ranked in the top 25 at one point. So by that standard you can say “The Big East is down.” But they can come down from that ridiculous height and still be head-and-shoulders above the rest of the conferences in the country. You can perhaps make an argument for the Big 12; they, like the Big East, have lost only five games combined as a conference and they boast two of the top three ranked teams at the moment (Kansas and Texas). But other than those two teams, their only representative in the polls is Oklahoma, who barely hung on to a spot in the AP poll, falling to #25 after losing to VCU over the weekend. Nobody else in the conference has shown much other than beating up on weaker teams, with the exception of Kansas State’s win over then-#18 Dayton.

Obviously there is a lot of game left to be played, but as it stands right now, it’s hard to dispute that the Big East has had the most early-season success of any of the conferences. SU’s role in this “surgence” (not a resurgence) was paramount, and their highly visible performance in New York got many of the watchers to wake up, change their tunes, and give the Big East the props it has earned so far. Let’s just hope it continues.

Except for Georgetown. I hate those guys.