Bleachers College Sports The Big East: Over Rated?
| 31 March 2009
All Year long I've been listening and reading crap and more crap about how the Big East is by far the best conference in NCAA Basketball today. Hogwash!
The truth must be told, and an in-depth exposure of this conspiracy must be contrived. For long enough we've been tricked and swindled into beliefs that misrepresent all that is right in the world. The tyranny must end and so let's begin the analysis.
hog·wash (hôgwôsh, -wsh, hg-)
n.
1. Worthless, false, or ridiculous speech or writing; nonsense.
2. Garbage fed to hogs; swill.
To show the biased discrepancy between the conferences you first have to look at the NCAA Tournament Seeding. A quick look at the top 16 seeds (teams seeded 4 or higher in the NCAA Tournament) shows it all.
Here is the breakdown by conference:
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Big East = 5 teams
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ACC = 3 teams
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Big 12 = 3 teams
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Big 10 = 1 team
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USA = 1 team -
West Coast = 1 team
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PAC 10 = 1 team
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Atlantic 10 = 1 team
Let's take a look at the regular season records.
- Big East vs. ACC = 3-9
- Big East vs. Big 12 = 3-2
- Big East vs. Big 10 = 6-3
- Big East vs. USA = 6-4
- Big East vs. West Coast = 1-1
- Big East vs. PAC 10 = 2-2
- Big East vs. Atlantic 10 = 14-4
Now what may puzzle some, is how the hell did the top 6 teams in the Big East all have more then 25 wins when they obviously were not able to dominate outside of the conference (apart from killing the Atlantic 10). Well I'll tell you. Taking a closer look at the Big East we can see that 8 teams had losing records from conference play. Yes I said 8 and yes that's a huge number. As a comparison, a conference such as the Big 10 only had 3 teams with sub .500 records in conference. What this shows us is that basically half of the Big East is plain and simply under par and therefore became fodder for the top teams, keeping them strong with easy wins. The most popular argument that I've heard as to proof that the Big East is "the best" is: "they had 5 teams in the Sweet 16". Well to that I say, they also had the easiest tournament schedule with 3 #1 seeds and 2 #3 seeds (gross). They faced nearly zero competition on their way to that uninspired feat. Something certainly smells this tournament season and I'm pretty sure it's the Big East. There's nothing better then watching them slowly get picked off one by one as they finally face some real competition. Here's to a Michigan St. vs. North Carolina finals. Then we can finally say, justice has been served.
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Comments (10)
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It's easy to pick out convenient numbers to make an argument... like when the bottom five Big East teams provide most of the out of conference losses in your stats. St Johns chalked up 4 ACC losses on their own. When St Johns plays Duke, and you take that stat and use it to sum up a conference, it doesn't fly. Number play can be as deceiving as you want it to. Here is a # for you, 50% of the final four is Big East... and that's just because Pitt and Nova had to play each other.
You also chose to omit such out of conference wins like Cuse over Memphis (who finished the season ranked #2 in the country in many polls) early in the season. But yeah, St. Johns, Rutgers, Depaul and South Florida scheduled far superior out of conference opponents that it nulls the entire conference. I really thought Rutgers was going to go to UNC and steal a victory, but instead they destroyed their conference.
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not true buddy
take louisville for example, as they are supposedly the cream of the crop in the big east, well they played probably the weakest out of conference schedule i've ever seen for a "good team", they didn't beat one single good team out of conference and yet the lost to teams like minnesota, western kentucky and unlv...
not to mention the first time they played anyone good in the tourney (michigan st.) they got their butts kicked
oh and shot out to penn st. for kicking the shit out of notre dames last night...
you sir, are hogwash
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Lousiville
I think UNC will take the tourney though. Hoping for an epic UConn/UNC matchup
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re: Louisville
fine let's take a look at uconn, they only played 3 decent out of conference teams during the regular season, michigan and wisconsin (6th and 7th in the big 10) and gonzaga, hardly top of the line scheduling for a "top team in the country"...
and pitt played an even easier schedule then uconn, their biggest out of conference competition was siena and florida st..... seriously, they "best teams" in the "best conference" played absolutely no one out of conference during the regular season??? terrible, hardly deserving of #1 seeds in the NCAA tourney, let alone 3 #1 seeds, what a joke
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actually
Why would they schedule top tier out of conference teams when they have to run the Big East gauntlet each year? When you are in such a deep conference, and are competing for a national title with an already stacked conference schedule, why would you schedule huge out of conference teams when you dont need to strengthen your schedule? Your strength of schedule is already high enough to give you a top ranking. That would be like Florida football throwing USC in the regular season just to prove that they play a hard enough schedule.
Also, they schedule these mini tournaments at the beginning of the year which have the potential to be against big name teams.
for example:
Cuse beat Memphis, Kansas, and a ranked Florida and they finished 6th in the Big East
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i'll give you syracuse
it's basically like taking a bunch of shitty teams and saying they're all awesome and since the shitty teams only play the other shitty teams no one is the wiser...
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