Blog Archives

There’s just one week left before the Big East Tournament, but so much has not been decided — at the top, bottom and middle of the conference.

We are the champions: Before the season, folks were about split about who they thought the best team in the Big East was. Four months later, and it appears that those two teams will play for the right to call itself the best when Louisville travels to Washington to play Georgetown on Saturday. Both teams are 14-3 in conference and off in this mid-week and therefore have about a week to prepare. Georgetown will have to figure out how it can get an inside game going that will earn it more than the four free throws the Hoyas shot in Louisville a month ago. Louisville will just be trying to cap a tremendous run of excellent basketball. The Cardinals have won nine straight, including a 14-point win over Villanova on Sunday.

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If this isn’t your first time visiting BigEastCast, you’ll notice that our website looks a lot different today than it has for the past several months. We’ve been redesigning the site for some time and are happy to roll out the new version this week — please bear with us as a few kinks are being worked out.

In the meantime, check out a few of the new features:

* Latest Episodes — check out the 3 most recent episodes of our show on the right side of the page.

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There are many additional features on the new site. Feel free to make yourself at home and check them out.

Bracket Buster weekend, a made for ESPN event that is actually a pretty good idea — unlike Who’s Now? — has propelled the MVC into a position to get multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament, something that has not been the case since the projections have gotten serious.

See full bracket projection >

Picked in the bottom half of the Big East in the preseason, few expected Notre Dame to sit near the top of the Big East standings at the end of February. Picked as co-favorite with Georgetown by the coaches preseason — and picked by me as the Big East favorite and a Final Four team — it’s no surprise that Louisville is near the top of the Big East standings.

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Please bear with us as we’re redesigning the BigEastCast website this weekend. The features will all be working by Monday, so check back then and have a nice weekend!

With just 15 days between now and the start of the Big East Tournament, the ebbs and flows of the conference season continue. Marquette is now one of the hottest teams in the conference after facing a moment of crisis just weeks ago. Meanwhile, some of the negative indicators are starting to come out that may show us why Connecticut is not as much like the UConn teams of the past as we might think. In this post — which will double as a power ranking — we’re going to take a look at what the numbers have to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the five elite teams in the Big East.

1. Louisville (22-6, 12-3): Winners of seven straight, the Cardinals are playing as well as any team in the country right now, and it’s going well on both ends of the floor. Louisville is just one of two teams — Marquette is the other — that ranks in the top five in both adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency in conference games (all these rankings are based on my personal calculations). We have seen a couple of chinks in the armor in the last two games though. In the first five games of the streak, Louisville scored more than a point per possession and allowed less than a point per possession in every game. In the last two games, Louisville didn’t manage a point per possession in the first (the win over Syracuse) and didn’t keep Pittsburgh anywhere near a point per possession (1.16) in the second.

Strengths: It’s hard to imagine, but Louisville is the best shooting team in the conference. Its 52.3 percent eFG in conference games is the league-leading mark. The win over Syracuse was the only game in which UofL didn’t break the magical 50 percent eFG mark during this seven-game streak. It’s the inside shooting that is leading to the great overall shooting numbers, as the Cardinals also lead the conference in 2-point field-goal percentage (53.5). The 3-point numbers are only league average, but the Cards continue to chuck them up on 37 percent of all attempts — second in the league to Georgetown.

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The process of identifying the last teams in the field was again excruciating this week. Perhaps nauseating would be a more appropriate word to describe it. I have to choose four teams from Arizona State, Baylor, California, Dayton, Florida, Houston, Mississippi, Oregon, Rhode Island? Really? And that was to complete a field that already had nose-holders Ohio State, Syracuse, Wake Forest and West Virginia. Are my standards too high? Am I getting delusional in my old age? Am I going to end this paragraph with five consecutive questions? No, I’m not.

Link to full projection >