College Basketball Big East Conference Review
Big East Conference Standings
Team Conference Overall
W L W L
Georgetown 10 3 20 4
Louisville 10 3 20 6
Connecticut 9 3 20 5
Notre Dame 9 3 19 5
Marquette 8 5 18 6
Pittsburgh 7 5 19 6
West Virginia 7 5 18 7
Cincinnati 7 5 12 12
Syracuse 7 6 17 9
Villanova 5 7 15 9
DePaul 5 7 10 14
Seton Hall 5 8 15 11
Providence 4 9 13 12
St John’s 4 9 10 14
S Florida 2 11 11 15
Rutgers 2 12 10 17
Around the Big East
CINCINNATI
Cincinnati's bid for a winning season is going to come down to how well the Bearcats defend their home court. The Bearcats have three winnable home games, beginning with South Florida, a team that has yet to win a Big East road game. The key there will be to cut back on the inside effectiveness of C Kentrell Gransberry, who has become one of the beasts of the Big East. Two tough road trips to Georgetown and Pitt follow before Providence comes to Cincinnati on March 2. In reality the Bearcats have over achieved this year and has won games no one expected them to win.
CONNECTICUT
The Huskies enter the week in prime position in the Big East. At 9-3, Connecticut is tied for the league lead in the loss column, even with Notre Dame having one fewer win in one fewer game than Georgetown and Louisville. Moreover, Connecticut has as good a chance as anyone at ending the season with at least a share of the title. With a nine-game winning streak, there's no team more confident than Connecticut. Even when the team was admittedly outplayed against South Florida, it still found a way to win in dramatic fashion, as Craig Austrie knocked down the winning basket with less than a second to play.
Connecticut has six games left, but it is done playing the teams it is tied with. Its road games are against Villanova, Rutgers and Providence, three teams fighting simply to make the 12-team conference tournament. It hosts red-hot West Virginia, and DePaul and Cincinnati squads, two teams that can match the Huskies' toughness, but not its talent. A schedule they can sweep. If Connecticut ties for the title, it's in decent shape in the tiebreaker as well. The Huskies beat Louisville head-to-head and split with Notre Dame. It lost to Georgetown by three early in the season in a game the team would dearly love to have back.
Regardless, the NCAA Tournament looks like a safe bet, and Connecticut appears to be firing on all cylinders. There might be more talented or deeper teams in the Big East, but right now Jim Calhoun's squad is the one nobody wants to play.
DEPAUL
With the season slipping away, coach Jerry Wainwright's chance to right his ship doesn't get any easier in the choppy waters that are road games at Connecticut. The Huskies, the hottest team in the league, have won nine in a row and beaten along the way Indiana, Pitt, Louisville and Notre Dame. The Huskies intimidate inside on defense, leading the league in blocked shots with 7-foot-3 C Hasheem Thabeet and are led offensively by the dynamic A.J. Price, who averages 15 points a game while leading the league in assists with 6.13 a game. DePaul is in a tough position gain any ground at this point.
GEORGETOWN
Georgetown coach John Thompson III made it official after the Hoyas' loss at Syracuse last weekend. His team needs to get a lot tougher to reach its goals this season. The Hoyas enter the week 20-4, but all four losses have come on the road before loud and boisterous crowds at Memphis, Pittsburgh, Louisville and Syracuse. The Syracuse loss was the worst of the four, since the Orangemen aren't the quality of team that the others are, and since the Hoyas took themselves out of the game early with a sloppy first half.
It's also more worrisome because it continued the team's offensive slump. Georgetown isn't a team that is peaking now. Its last five games include two crushing losses against good teams and three close wins against mediocre ones. And that number could be even worse; it took a questionable call far from the basket to allow the Hoyas to slip past Villanova at home last week. Georgetown is a veteran team with a lot of upperclassmen who have been through the wars. That could help down the stretch, but it sometimes looks as if players are convinced that these struggles they are going through now are no big deal because they'll turn on the jets when needed in March.
That's often a recipe for failure, and it's an issue the coaching staff will be addressing as the regular season draws to a close. People have said that Georgetown is over rated and we will find out over the next several weeks.
LOUISVILLE
Now in the heart of the race for the Big East regular-season championship and pushing for a high seed in the NCAA Tournament, Louisville has to go to work at Freedom Hall, playing three of its next four games at home. At the same time, it has one big defensive struggle coming up on the road, facing Pitt on Sunday. The Panthers are trying to salvage their season after losing to Marquette despite the return of PG Levance Fields. These two teams are among the four best defensive teams in the conference. The Louisville is actually a great story and they are one of the top 20 teams in the country, yet they are not even ranked entering last weekend’s games. The early season injuries cost them a ton of games but they have gotten healthy at the right time and that is league play. Louisville has a tougher schedule then the teams they are fighting against for the league championship but even if they don’t win the championship I would not be surprised if they won the league tournament. This team will surprise a lot of people in March and depending on their draw could go a long way and into the later rounds of the final 64.
MARQUETTE
How quickly things can turn around. A week ago, the Golden Eagles were at the low point of their season, having dropped back-to-back games to Louisville and Notre Dame and then out of the Associated Press' media poll for the first time since January of 2007.
Now, fast forward to this week, that same MU team is not only riding a two-game winning streak during which it's played some of its best basketball of the season, it also finds itself alone in fifth place in the Big East standings. And even better for the Golden Eagles, they have a serious chance to make up even more ground with a pair of games against two of the league's worst teams in St. John's and Rutgers. The age old question comes to mind with Marquete, which team is going to show up today?
NOTRE DAME
It has been a long road. But Notre Dame suddenly finds itself in the passing lane. The Irish are in position to possibly win the Big East regular-season championship. When the Irish squeezed by Rutgers at the RAC to start the week, it left them with a 9-3 record, one-half game behind Georgetown and Louisville and tied with Connecticut. They have a very favorable schedule ahead of them.
PITTSBURGH
On one hand, Pittsburgh has done well this season to go 7-5 in its first 12 Big East games. Without Mike Cook for the rest of the season, and absent Levance Fields for all but one of its league games, the Panthers still were in the top 25 a week ago. Fields is back now, but that didn't make much of a difference as the team got blown out at Marquette Feb. 15. And despite the strong NCAA Tournament resume at the moment, this is still a team that has some problems to work through if it hopes to be able to do any damage. For starters, right now, the Panthers are the textbook example of a team that could go out in the first round of any postseason tournament it gets to if it faces a team with a quick backcourt. The Marquette game saw numerous Golden Eagles' possessions end with a guard streaking past his defender and getting to the basket. Part of that is the result of Fields being less than 100 percent, but it was an issue early in the season, even when Fields was healthy.
Pittsburgh has a strong frontcourt, particularly Sam Young. The junior is having an all-Big East type of season and has raised his average more than 10 points from a year ago. DeJuan Blair is the team's second-leading scorer, and the freshman has adjusted quickly to the pivot. Still with Cook unavailable the rest of the season we find Pittsburgh in a upset role.
PROVIDENCE
Providence has gone from being an NCAA Tournament contender to a squad that's on the outside looking in as far as making even the Big East Tournament goes. That's a tremendous disappointment for a team that began the year with loftier aspirations, and there's a better than fair chance that it will wind up costing coach Tim Welsh his job at season's end. It's hard to win at Providence, and injuries haven't helped the situation. Sharaud Curry's missing most of the season was a huge loss, and Jeff Xavier and Geoff McDermott are currently ailing as well. Dwain Williams also missed time because of injury, and Jonathan Kale lost a couple of games because of a suspension.
Still, plenty of Big East teams have had injuries and suspensions to battle through, and few are as disappointing as the Friars. Because of how the roster was constructed, the team felt it was in good shape to contend in the conference, but ultimately had no margin for error. After the loss yesterday it looks like they will not make the league tournament.
RUTGERS
At this point in the season for Rutgers, it's all about making progress. Barring a miraculous series of events, the Scarlet Knights won't be one of the 12 teams to qualify for the Big East Tournament in March. There's too much ground to make up in the standings, and the team is just about out of time.
SETON HALL
Seton Hall enters the week on a five-game losing streak. The optimism of late January is gone, and the primary goal now is to right the Pirate ship in time to make the Big East Tournament. One reason for the poor play is that coach Bobby Gonzalez has had to change his defensive scheme to accommodate the loss of guard Paul Gause to a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Without Gause, the team is down to nine scholarship players and can't press effectively for more than a few minutes at a time. That hurts the team on both ends of the court. Seton Hall used its defense to set up baskets in transition, because it's not a team that likes to play in a traditional halfcourt set.
It's easy to see what the lack of defensive pressure has caused. Seton Hall hasn't scored more than 70 points in a game during the losing streak, and has allowed 89 points or more three times.
SOUTH FLORIDA
With South Florida playing as well as it has all season, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Bulls could get their first road victory in the Big East shortly. The next game is on Feb. 20 at Cincinnati, also a coming team. The Bearcats have improved as the season wore on and will be fresh, but if USF can slow a tiring G Deonta Vaughn they may have a shot. Perhaps the best chance for a road victory this year will come on March 1, however, when they face a struggling Rutgers team at the RAC.
ST. JOHN'S
Marquette is a tough matchup for the Red Storm, because the Golden Eagles have a quick backcourt that tends to give St. John's problems. But it's a must-win contest for Norm Roberts' crew at home, so the team will need a strong effort on the boards and a very limited amount of turnovers to secure the upset of a Marquette team playing as well as anyone in the conference. While we don’t see them beating Marquette their next game could seal their fate and leave them out of the league tournament.
SYRACUSE
Notre Dame isn't a great matchup for Syracuse, as it's strong at all positions and can score both inside and out. But Jim Boeheim will have nearly a week to prepare his team for the Fighting Irish, and Mike Brey's Fighting Irish first have to worry about playing Pitt on Feb. 21. An upset on the road would give the NCAA Tournament selection committee another reason to take the Orangemen, who will likely once again find themselves on the dreaded bubble.
VILLANOVA
Coach Jay Wright could have told everyone that he knew what to expect when his team took the court Feb. 16 against St. John's, but he would have been lying. The Wildcats were coming off a brutal loss at then-No. 8 Georgetown. Tied with less than a second left, Corey Stokes was called for a foul away from the basket, and the Hoyas knocked down the free throws to win the game. For a team on the bubble, as Villanova's best case appears to be, that loss is a dagger. A win on the road against a team like that does wonders for the winner's computer numbers, not to mention the impression it leaves on those doing the selecting. A loss is ultimately just another loss.
Wright said his team was so quiet in the pregame locker room the next time out that he was concerned. It's a young enough team, and the opponent was mediocre enough, that the Wildcats might have been expected to go through the motions. Instead, Villanova blitzed St. John's from the opening tip, holding the Red Storm to 13 points by halftime and cruising to an 18-point victory. That gives them, for the moment, a one-game cushion for making the Big East Tournament.
WEST VIRGINIA
Now West Virginia has to do what may be toughest in the Big East win a few games on the road as it battles toward the NIT. Three of the next four games are away from the Coliseum. The only home game in that span is on Feb. 23 against Providence. You can talk strategy, but the truth is: The Mountaineers have to maintain their high-pressure defense that has held every opponent to fewer than 70 points since Dec. 28 and begin shooting better than they have. With Higgins changing his style ever so slightly to match his current roster this team is a home team and can beat anyone at home, however, the road is a different story.