Big East Basketball: Top-Heavy, Down Year Or Just A Lot Of Pretty Good Teams?

With how the program has done under coach Wright, but I have to agree that Nova will be bottom-feeders this year.

Although I will say Gibbs is one of the most overrated players in the Big East. I know he has had his accolades and seems like he is always 1st team Big East. I just dont see what he does more then shoot 3’s

He can’t setup at the 3pt line or run curls around screens to get open shots as a result. If / When they get Woodall back, they’ll be a different team.

In fact, only the Big Ten has its worst team at a higher RPI than ours.

Hes just a douche bag who for some reason hates Syracuse. Or is a homer for some other team in the rankings.

The road slate doesn’t matter. Get W’s and it doesn’t matter who you play. As the late Al Davis would say, “Just win, baby”.

They’re essentially pseudo-conference games against established secondary rivals. They play every year, so they’re not unique “true OOC road games” that the media wants. You can also put things like the ACC-Big Ten challenge in this category.

Let’s look at some of the other top teams’ OOC schedules:

Kentucky: Plays UNC, Louisville, and Indiana every year, either home or away, so we’re going to discount these as “conference” games. We’re also counting the game against St. John’s (also at home) as a conference game since this is forced by the SEC-Big East challenge. This year, the other games against Power 8+8 teams were against Kansas at the Garden, and against Penn State and Old Dominion on other neutral sites. Now they should get some credit ideally for playing KU on a neutral site, but the fact is that it wasn’t a scheduled “true road game” in the kind that ESPN LOVES to chide us for. Their ONLY true road game OOC was at IU, and that game is played every year. UK had no “Let’s play each other!” games, at home or away.

North Carolina: Plays Kentucky every year OOC, so this one doesn’t count. They DID play another “true road game” but it was at UNC-Asheville (yay!). Now their OOC slate does include some Power 8+8 teams, but they’re all at home or at neutral sites, which is what matters here. The game against Wisconsin doesn’t count because that’s an ACC-Big Ten Challenge game. The game against Texas was the only game UNC scheduled as part of a “let’s play each other!” deal, but it was at home. They did have several neutral site games as well, against Mississippi Valley State (hooray!) and Tennessee State (Hurrah!), but also games against MSU (which fans of either team were barred from attending unless they were military top brass), South Carolina, or UNLV (the latter of which they don’t get credit for until Syracuse-in-Tampa and Syracuse-in-KC count as road games).

Ohio State: Gets credit from me. They had three “let’s play each other!” games this year, and two of them were on the road (at Kansas, at South Carolina) and one was at home (Florida). Duke doesn’t count because that’s an ACC-Big Ten challenge game. So I’m going to give them credit where it’s due.

So basically, the only team of the teams everyone talks about that should get credit for their schedule is Ohio State. Our schedule was very similar to UNC’s, with one “Let’s play each other!” game that was on the road. Florida was a pseudo-conference game, and we did host two other Power 8+8 teams, even if they were Fordham and GW. When we go to the ACC we’re going to have our pseudo-conference games rise, with Georgetown, St. John’s and the ACC-Big Ten challenge all on our schedule, good thing too because we’re going to be playing in a conference with only three other perennial contenders.

He will NEVER have our back.

you betcha