Welcome to The Holy Land of Hoops

A couple of Excerpts (link at bottom has full article):


Can the new-look Big East remain a college hoops power? Check back at NCAA Tournament time

The Big East men's basketball season began in earnest on Wednesday with its annual media day. One of the questions posed to most of the coaches was whether this new 10-team incarnation of the Big East is a power conference or a mid-major. That will be scrutinized in the coming months, by college basketball fans as well as the NCAA Tournament selection committee.

The new Big East is under a lot of pressure to prove it is still a power conference out of the gate and end all speculation.

The best way to accomplish that is for it to place at least five schools in the 68-team draw for the NCAAs. The second best way would be to make the conference tournament – again to be held at Madison Square Garden – the spectacular sporting event that it was for the three decades until the breakup after last season.

Val Ackerman, the conference's new commissioner, invoked the mission of a Big East founder when she said "we are going to do everything that Dave Gavitt set out to do when he brought this league into being in 1979 – we're going to make this basketball conference a force" in her opening remarks.

She pointed out that five of the 10 schools in the remodeled Big East were in the NCAA Tournament last season and added "our sights are set just as high, if not higher, this year."
...

St. John's coach Steve Lavin envisions the reformulated Big East being what the Pac-10 used to be when he was at UCLA.

"It sets up very nicely for the Big East on a regular basis to have seven or eight teams in the hunt for the NCAA Tournament. You can get five or six teams in consistently," Lavin said. "A down year was four, a good year was six ... Half the league was going to the NCAA Tournament, and not only did they get in, they were making runs. The Big East should be able to do the same thing with the quality of the coaching, the recruiting centers the schools are in, operating out of the Garden and the TV exposure."......

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/colle ... z2i0L6d6Ea

we've been over this before but this piece has some updated quotes from yesterday, apparently Lavin has been a big advocate for staying at 10. Either way I think the 4 things we can watch through the year are:

1)OOC games -we need to do well here
2)do we fill the garden for the BET
3)how many teams get the invite (hopefully at least 5)
4)do any of our teams make a run. I say we could use 2 decent runs (sweet 16) or at least 1 deep run to put our stamp on things as a power conference.


This first year will be HUGE in shaping perception of the new BE.

dmac80 wrote:we've been over this before but this piece has some updated quotes from yesterday, apparently Lavin has been a big advocate for staying at 10. Either way I think the 4 things we can watch through the year are:

1)OOC games -we need to do well here
2)do we fill the garden for the BET
3)how many teams get the invite (hopefully at least 5)
4)do any of our teams make a run. I say we could use 2 decent runs (sweet 16) or at least 1 deep run to put our stamp on things as a power conference.


This first year will be HUGE in shaping perception of the new BE.

Totally agree. You only get one chance to make a first impression and this is our chance. Our first chance is pretty much make or break and everyone has to step up and do their part. It would be great if all of our teams emerged from the OOC with no more than 1 loss per team.

JOPO wrote:It would be great if all of our teams emerged from the OOC with no more than 1 loss per team.

Gosh that's asking ALOT

Yeah, that's really tough. PC plays Kentucky. Then, if they won the Paradise Jam it would mean they beat Vanderbilt, LaSalle and Maryland. Plus they have road games at URI and UMass. I'd be absolutely thrilled with one loss, but that's a tall order. And I know some BE teams play tougher schedules than PC.

JOPO wrote:

dmac80 wrote:we've been over this before but this piece has some updated quotes from yesterday, apparently Lavin has been a big advocate for staying at 10. Either way I think the 4 things we can watch through the year are:

1)OOC games -we need to do well here
2)do we fill the garden for the BET
3)how many teams get the invite (hopefully at least 5)
4)do any of our teams make a run. I say we could use 2 decent runs (sweet 16) or at least 1 deep run to put our stamp on things as a power conference.


This first year will be HUGE in shaping perception of the new BE.

Totally agree. You only get one chance to make a first impression and this is our chance. Our first chance is pretty much make or break and everyone has to step up and do their part. It would be great if all of our teams emerged from the OOC with no more than 1 loss per team.

If all our our BE teams emerged with just 1 OOC loss almost every team would be ranked and ranked highly. I think if we could have 4 or 5 teams with 1 or 2 losses to start conference play that would be huge. I think it is important that BE teams can win a few marquee OOC games against the other power conferences to show that we can still play at that high of a level and I believe we will.

Daffron24 wrote:

JOPO wrote:

dmac80 wrote:we've been over this before but this piece has some updated quotes from yesterday, apparently Lavin has been a big advocate for staying at 10. Either way I think the 4 things we can watch through the year are:

1)OOC games -we need to do well here
2)do we fill the garden for the BET
3)how many teams get the invite (hopefully at least 5)
4)do any of our teams make a run. I say we could use 2 decent runs (sweet 16) or at least 1 deep run to put our stamp on things as a power conference.


This first year will be HUGE in shaping perception of the new BE.

Totally agree. You only get one chance to make a first impression and this is our chance. Our first chance is pretty much make or break and everyone has to step up and do their part. It would be great if all of our teams emerged from the OOC with no more than 1 loss per team.

If all our our BE teams emerged with just 1 OOC loss almost every team would be ranked and ranked highly. I think if we could have 4 or 5 teams with 1 or 2 losses to start conference play that would be huge. I think it is important that BE teams can win a few marquee OOC games against the other power conferences to show that we can still play at that high of a level and I believe we will.

I could actually see Depaul getting to the conference with one or no losses. They play ASU and that's about it.

Seton Hall better get to the conference with one or no losses. After Michigan State in the Coaches vs Cancer our schedule is littered with match-ups against such powerhouses as the Little Sisters of Hope and Middlesex Academy of the Blind and Deaf.

JOPO wrote:Seton Hall better get to the conference with one or no losses. After Michigan State in the Coaches vs Cancer our schedule is littered with match-ups against such powerhouses as the Little Sisters of Hope and Middlesex Academy of the Blind and Deaf.

Watch out for Oklahoma and Kent State. Then there are always the upsets which everyone suffers. Playing Rutgers at their place won't be a gimme. And Mercer, another road team, pulled off upsets last year of Florida State, Alabama, and Florida Gulf Coast.

generally speaking a glance thru NBE ooc schedule won't impress anyone so the teams better come close to running the table or the inaugural season won't be very successful. imho NBE will have to upgrade the ooc portion of their schedule which was impossible for this season.