Can the talking heads explain 11 Big East bids now?

[DUBulldog]

Does anyone else besides bigdawg disagree with me? I’m not going to beat a dead horse just to try to win over a single convert, but I’m more than willing to explain myself further if there are others who disagree with my statements.

Jamar, I understand the math. But, I think that a league that should have won slightly more than 2/3 of its games based on seed, and won only 1/2 of them, has seriously underachieved, and was probably overrated.

And, although I don't have the scores in front of me, I think several of their teams didn't just lose, but lost badly.

[pafan]

Too bad the Valley couldn't have faced a big east team in the second round of the tournament.

Oh, lol. We did.

[DUBulldog]

Charles Barkley has been hilarious. The last comment I heard from him last night was something along the lines of calling it the Itty Bitty East.

And thank god for it. Espn has their tongue so far down the big east's throat that no one on the network would dare cross the league. It makes me wonder how influential the conferences are in their tv deals and with the announcers who appear to have so much to say about who deserves to be dancing.

Of course ESPN has their tongue down the Big East's throat. I'm not sure that young people know how inexorably linked ESPN and the Big East are. Without ESPN, the Big East as we know it doesn't exist. Without the Big East, ESPN would not exist.

Back in the day, when ESPN and the Big East were both new, neither was a "player" in the grand scheme of things. ESPN didn't have college football, MLB, etc. They had sports like Boxing, Rugby, Australian Rules Football, etc....and those were the "big name" sports they carried. There was very little college b-ball on TV in those days, maybe 1 game a week at most....and that's on all the networks put together. The Big East was a brand new conference located in the northeast.....ESPN was a brand new network, broadcasting out of a shed in Bristol, CT. To fill up air time, ESPN started showing Big East games. In those days, nobody outside the northeast USA had heard of most of those schools. I remember thinking "WTF is Seton Hall?".

Funny thing happened. Players started wanting to play for those schools. Good players. Real good players. Players who wanted their friends and family to be able to see them on TV. Almost overnight, the Big East turned into a basketball powerhouse, and ESPN became a major player in broadcast television.
The rest is history.

So, of course ESPN is going to stroke the Big East.

[MSUDuo]

Top to bottom, the Big East was the best conference. The problem isn't with the Big East, it is/was with everyone's expectations; ie. ESPN.

Being the best conference top to bottom doesn't mean you have the teams to make deep runs which is what great teams do. Good teams are more likely to be upset which is what you got with Louisville, Georgetown, Pitt, ND, and so on. The Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, ACC all have great teams that can win it all.

Even though Pitt was technically the #3 1 seed, most people thought they were the weakest 1 seed and it showed. They and Notre Dame are probably the only ones that underachieved but at the same time, if you had watched them this year, you could have seen this coming as the have had troubles scoring many times this year...

While 2 out of 11 is bad in almost every langauge, it is all about what one expects and while I did have the Big East with 5 in one bracket, I had several of them getting upset in others as well and Richmond, VCU, and Butler going through...


So, I had no problem with the Big East getting 11 bids as the committee tries to select the best 37 at-large teams for the tournament. All 11 were a part of those 37 and it shouldn't change based on how they ended up doing...

[Jamar Howard 4 Pres]

Does anyone else besides bigdawg disagree with me? I’m not going to beat a dead horse just to try to win over a single convert, but I’m more than willing to explain myself further if there are others who disagree with my statements.

Jamar, I understand the math. But, I think that a league that should have won slightly more than 2/3 of its games based on seed, and won only 1/2 of them, has seriously underachieved, and was probably overrated.

And, although I don't have the scores in front of me, I think several of their teams didn't just lose, but lost badly.

I have no problem saying the Big East underachieved and was probably overseeded. My main problem is people who overreact and make stupid statements. The fact that Charles Barkley stated on national TV last night that the Big East should have only had 8 teams in the tournament shows why I'm so thankful that he doesn't have a spot on the Selection Committee. Who would he have thrown out? Marquette? They're in the Sweet 16. Villanova? They played in a nailbiter before finally falling to an 8 seed. Someone else? There wasn't anyone else worse than a 6 seed! How do you find 3 teams to leave out altogether?

It is this type of insanity that I was trying to combat.

[WSUbballer]

I think somebody's eating what ESPN has been feeding..

Just because the ESPN clan believes teams are good or better than others, doesn't make it so. And it's more about the skewed, statistical, fudgey numbers game.

[MetDrakeFan]

Big East sucked in the tourney very badly. Did they deserve a lot of bids? I think so. Did they deserve such high seeding? Probably not. But who goes in their place? I would love EVERY YEAR for MVC teams and the like to get better seeding, but we don't. Look at UNI last year, totally screwed with their 9? seed. They should have been a 4 or 5 seed.

[Jamar Howard 4 Pres]

WSUbballer, which 3 Big East teams would you have left out?

[CaseyGarrisonforPrez]

WSUbballer, which 3 Big East teams would you have left out?

I'm no Wheat Shocker but Villanova and Marquette should not have made it. I don't care that Marquette is in the Sweet Sixteen either, should not have been an at large over some of the others out there.

[Jamar Howard 4 Pres]

Give me a team to compare.