Imagine if you will a team that wins the Big East regular season title. Not a share of the title, not some Mickey Mouse way like playing fewer games than their competitors while also playing the easiest conference schedule of anyone in the league, but a pure, outright, double round robin win. Pretty impressive, right?
Imagine that same team turned around and won three games in three days to win the Big East Tournament at the World’s Most Famous Arena. Imagine that, in so doing, they avenged their
only two regular season conference losses by an aggregate of 33 points, including whopping a team that would end up as a two seed in the NCAA Tournament by 20 to earn the right to cut down the nets.
Of course you’re not imagining anything right now, you’re just thinking of the 2026 St. John’s Red Storm. Their efforts on the season accumulated for them 7.3 Wins Above Bubble, tied for 14th in the country. They sit 0.1 WAB behind 3 seed Gonzaga in 13th and 0.6 WAB above 3 seed Illinois in 15th. It doesn’t take a genius or even a math major to see that they’re probably deserving of a similar seed as the two teams on either side of them.
Nope, 5 seed.
So… why? NCAA Selection Committee Chairperson Keith Gill did maybe as good a job of answering questions regarding selection and seeding as anyone we’ve see in that seat for quite some time. When questioned about the Big East, he implicitly devalued the league by saying that the included teams – and 21-12 Seton Hall, who missed out – didn’t do enough in the non-conference to backup their league results, ending in either omission or harsh seeding.
This stems from two fairly obvious issues. The first is that the Big East has to get better. The entire league outside of DePaul finished inside the top 100 of the KenPom, though you can argue that DePaul’s trajectory is finally trending in the right direction. Unfortunately, only three teams finished inside the top 50. Only two teams were in the top 30 of the NET, meaning they were a Q1 game home and away. A staggering seven teams were Q3 games at home; that can’t happen in a power league.
Worse still, some programs seem content to remain mired in mediocrity. Georgetown, once a proud national powerhouse, now seems flattered by the honor of having Ed Cooley go 16-44 in conference games while he whiles away his dotage in a retirement gig, more concerned with the hydration levels of small children around him than he is with winning games. Butler fired Lavall Jordan for going 31-35 in the Big East in his last four years, including 14-26 in his final two seasons. They just confirmed that they’ll bring back Thad Matta for a fifth year despite the fact that he is 28-52 in his four seasons there, including 13-27 in his last two.
Providence, having whiffed on replacing Ed Cooley, is rebooting again.
The league needs the bottom half to pull its own weight. Xavier is trending the right way under Richard Pitino, Marquette has Shaka Smart finally embracing the transfer portal, Shaheen Holloway seems to have gotten his feet under him (and a bankroll behind him) at Seton Hall, and only a fool would count out a coach with a track record like Greg McDermott.
The bare minimum expectation in this league should be to be within the top 75 of the NET. Programs that aren’t pushing for it can be pushed towards the door.
I think even more concerning that the on-court performance is the perception of the league. It wasn’t that long ago that you could tell if someone wasn’t a ball-knower if they referenced the Power 5 in a college hoops context. Take it back to the gridiron, you ignoramus.
Now there is what seems to be a concerted push to shoehorn the term “Power 4” (RIP Pac-8/10/12) into every conversation around college basketball. ESPN’s bracket breakdown show even had the talking heads at the desk referencing the “most Power 4 teams – not counting the Big East – ever in the tournament” or some such nonsense immediately before I turned it off and let my daughter use the TV to play Horizon: Zero Dawn.
I don’t think that’s anything other than intentional. The big money TV contracts are handed out in football, and the broadcasting entities paying that money are going to turn their noses up at any league that isn’t handing out concussions like party favors on fall Saturdays. They don’t care about the health of college sports as a whole or the actual quality of the competition, they just want to drive narratives that generate traffic and engagement. Whether or not it has any basis in fact is a minor concern at best. Sorry to be the one to have to tell you this.
The bottom line is that the Big East needs someone out there advocating for it. Rick Pitino, ever shameless, does a pretty good job as the face of the league, but he’s also busy preparing his team for the greatest sporting event on earth. If raising heck about something like this isn’t Val Ackerman’s job, I’m not sure whose it might be. It is obviously incumbent on the league members to put the best product possible on the floor on a nightly basis, but someone needs to be drawing the spotlight away from the same chattering buffoons that sit behind a desk stumping for their nepo babies on a nightly basis and onto the Big East’s stars.
In the current college sports environment, the future of the league might depend on it.
