Two years ago, Syracuse rewrote the Big East record accounts, becoming the essential team in the league olden times to win four games in four days. And capture the conference tourney.
The Orange, horsy the emblem of Gerry McNamara’s key, were equitably lauded as a team of . Winning back-to-back-to-back-to-back games in a league stuffed to the gills with talent, is only vaguely less difficult than forcibly eating doubtful bugs to earn $1,000,000 from a television show.
And now Syracuse – and Pitt, which replicated the Big East feat last spell — are nothing more than a bunch of slugs. Four games in four days?
Puh-lease. Like a game of hopscotch.
Welcome to 2009, where the Big East tournament will be the creature in , a five-day where the alike of one region of the NCAA contest bracket (16 teams in all) will vie for the conference’s competition peak.
Member schools’ university presidents voted this year to include all Big East in the conference event, consummation a three-time of year run (that coincided with the league’s spreading out) that left four teams out of the March mix in New York.
“It everybody a unplanned to compete, and that’s what everybody desires,” said Rutgers coach Fred Hill, team didn’t make it to New York last period. “If you haven’t had the best season, there’s a light at the end of the time to salvage your term.”
But together this tiny initiative doesn’t come without misgivings, including from the commissioner who has the league for 18 years. Mike Tranghese has steered the Big East through every sort of bump and hypothetical snag, including the enlargement to 16 teams that each one argued was unwieldy. Now set to go away at the end of the period, Tranghese isn’t sold on this cutting-edge Big East wrinkle.
For four days, the Big East game is on par with the hottest Broadway show as one of the toughest tickets to get a hold of in New York City. The construction is not often empty and under no circumstances quiet, a noisy heaven from the basic tip at noon on Wednesday until the championship game on Saturday night.
Tranghese worries that at the nethermost of the league vat won’t carry the same fan numbers on Tuesday night and more, that further schools’ fans — especially those from the top four who don’t play until Thursday — will use Tuesday as nothing more than a travel day and not soup ladle up the .
“How do we get them into the erection on Tuesday?” said Tranghese, who against to 16 teams. “We commonly sell them in packets. That’s our encounter, to put nationality in the stands on Tuesday, to make an environment.”
There’s also the instinct that by pleasing every person, the regular spell becomes of the order of as stimulating as T-ball, where there are no losers. Two years ago, Notre Dame hosted DePaul in the regular-term end, with each team at 5-10 in the league. Winner goes to New York; loser to the . In front of a packed Joyce Center, the game came down to the last shot, with Draelon Burns’ wasted 3-pointer signaling the end for the Blue Demons and a new beginning for the Irish.
Will that same end-of-the-season fury be created, Tranghese wonders, if the only mechanism at stake is an 11-seed in the playoffs versus a 14?
“It won’t have the same significance,” he said. “It can’t.”
Of track, with NCAA match bids on the line, there are far more pressing concerns to teams and than empty seats. The Big East stuck teams into this year’s NCAA tourney bracket, the most of any conference in the country.
Early this time are that the league could make a logical argument for nine squads (Connecticut, Georgetown, Louisville, Notre Dame, Marquette, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Villanova and West Virginia).
What if one of teams is knocked off by the 15th- or 16th-place team in the league?
Or more likely, what if the 10th-place team sitting decidedly on the bubble when the contest , to the champ of a Tuesday game?
In a incident of painful dryness, the league fail its NCAA game stage with its own postseason?
“Yeah, it hurt you; you could lose,” said Villanova coach Jay Wright, whose eighth-place Big East team played its way into the NCAA tourney with a earliest-round win over Syracuse in New York last time of year. “There are a lot of potential negatives but so what? We can’t be afraid of games.”
