Actually, the BE had an amazingly great day on the courts, probably its best of the year. Besides Nova over KU and DePaul over NW, St. John's defeated Arizona, Creighton topped ASU, Providence clobbered Texas, and Butler won over Purdue in the little Indiana college basketball get-together in Indianapolis. All of that came on the heels of SHU knocking off UMd the day before.
We keep hoping the BE will just go away but it doesn't seem to be happening
No one is hoping the BE goes away, it all comes down to the nonsense people kept talking about offseason wise with the B1G somehow not being as good etc.
I don't think anyone would say the Big East is as good as the B1G, but the silly argument tossed around was national championships won by Villanova as some sort of credit card for the rest of the conference.
The BE had a great 2 days, but that's as far as it goes. Overall, they have a couple of ranked teams and will get their 5 NCAA bids, unless something dramatic happens and someone like St John's gets red hot.
Every metric has the B1G as the 1st or 2nd best conference and while DePaul is improving, they're not the best in the Big East. If they are and they scraped by Northwestern by 5 at home, then what are we actually talking about?
Nova is still the standard of the BE, but they're very young and will be better in late February than now. We saw preseason favorites Seton Hall and Xavier and Butler still have to be assumed as NCAA teams.
Providence hailed by many, has had a rough season although they crushed Texas. It's a rollercoaster for everybody in every league but I don't see 1 or 2 days erasing the body of work.
This may be the 1 year where 25 teams can make an Elite 8, when normally you would say 10 or 12 max. It's very balanced and exciting to see what happens.
