NEW YORK - After his Connecticut basketball team lost at West Virginia last week, Jim Calhoun made a crack that he was looking forward to the end of the regular season and the start of tournament play, but he would prefer one slight twist.
NEW YORK - After his Connecticut basketball team lost at West Virginia last week, Jim Calhoun made a crack that he was looking forward to the end of the regular season and the start of tournament play, but he would prefer one slight twist.
"I want to skip the Big East tournament and go right to an easier one,'' he said.
And which one would that be?
"The NCAAs,'' he said.
He was kidding. He admitted as much.
Some would beg to differ, though. Not with the premise that the Big East tournament is more difficult than the NCAAs, but that Calhoun shouldn't have said he was joking.
This Big East tournament is tougher than the NCAAs. And the point really isn't even arguable.
"I think there's a chance you're going to play four really good teams that you're not going to face in the NCAA tournament,'' said West Virginia senior Cam Thoroughman, who has seen his share of both events the last four years. "In the first round of the NCAA tournament, a lot of the top seeds are going to face somebody that's cake. And then if there's an upset [elsewhere in the bracket], who knows?
"In the Big East you're going to play four tough opponents, maybe four ranked teams, in four days, and they're all going to be good.''
The truth is, the only thing harder about the NCAA tournament is the quality of the competition at the very top. In that regard, the NCAA tournament is deeper. In a perfect world, the 16 best teams in the country are playing the second week of the event. The eight best survive to the weekend. The four best make it to the Final Four.
And even if the best don't make it there, the teams that do are ones that beat the best. At that point, that field is undeniably the best in college basketball.
From that standpoint, there might even be better conference tournaments at the end than the Big East, although that's purely opinion based. Maybe you think Duke-North Carolina or Kansas-Texas or Ohio State-Purdue is a better potential final than, say, Pitt-Notre Dame. Fine. Whatever you believe.
We're not talking about the end game here, though. We're talking about the tournament as a whole, the field on balance and how difficult it is to navigate.
NEW YORK - After his Connecticut basketball team lost at West Virginia last week, Jim Calhoun made a crack that he was looking forward to the end of the regular season and the start of tournament play, but he would prefer one slight twist.
"I want to skip the Big East tournament and go right to an easier one,'' he said.
And which one would that be?
"The NCAAs,'' he said.
He was kidding. He admitted as much.
Some would beg to differ, though. Not with the premise that the Big East tournament is more difficult than the NCAAs, but that Calhoun shouldn't have said he was joking.
This Big East tournament is tougher than the NCAAs. And the point really isn't even arguable.
"I think there's a chance you're going to play four really good teams that you're not going to face in the NCAA tournament,'' said West Virginia senior Cam Thoroughman, who has seen his share of both events the last four years. "In the first round of the NCAA tournament, a lot of the top seeds are going to face somebody that's cake. And then if there's an upset [elsewhere in the bracket], who knows?
"In the Big East you're going to play four tough opponents, maybe four ranked teams, in four days, and they're all going to be good.''
The truth is, the only thing harder about the NCAA tournament is the quality of the competition at the very top. In that regard, the NCAA tournament is deeper. In a perfect world, the 16 best teams in the country are playing the second week of the event. The eight best survive to the weekend. The four best make it to the Final Four.
And even if the best don't make it there, the teams that do are ones that beat the best. At that point, that field is undeniably the best in college basketball.
From that standpoint, there might even be better conference tournaments at the end than the Big East, although that's purely opinion based. Maybe you think Duke-North Carolina or Kansas-Texas or Ohio State-Purdue is a better potential final than, say, Pitt-Notre Dame. Fine. Whatever you believe.
We're not talking about the end game here, though. We're talking about the tournament as a whole, the field on balance and how difficult it is to navigate.
The Big East is more difficult than any other, including the NCAAs. Period. It's not even debatable.
Think of it this way: The 68-team NCAA tournament is broken down - after the play-in games - to four 16-team brackets. Each of those brackets includes a handful of automatic qualifiers from conferences that, face it, have no chance to succeed in the tournament. Also in the mix are a myriad of third- and fourth- and fifth-place teams from the major conferences. On average, each of those 16-team brackets will include roughly six Top 25 teams.
The Big East tournament is a 16-team bracket, too. It has nine ranked teams this year and a 10th (Villanova) that spent most of the season not only in the Top 25, but in the Top 10 before fading late.
Show me an NCAA tournament bracket where a ninth seed is ranked No. 21 in the country, like Connecticut is.
Now, let's add logistics to the mix. The NCAA tournament will be announced Sunday. Most of the field will have either three or four days to prepare for its first-round opponent. In the case of most of the Big East teams in this year's NCAA field, that will be against a lower-seeded team.
When a team wins in the NCAA tournament, it gets a day off to rest and prepare before playing again. If the team wins there, it's another four or five days to get ready for a third-round game. And there is a decent chance that for the better seeds in the tournament, that third-round game will be the first they play against a ranked opponent.
The Big East? There are 15 games crammed into five days this week. If one accepts that Marquette will be the 11th league team with an invite, just one of those games - Rutgers' overtime win against Seton Hall Tuesday afternoon - did not include a team bound for the NCAA tournament. Heading into Tuesday's night games, there was the possibility that 10 of the last 11 games at Madison Square Garden this week will be between NCAA tournament teams.
And there won't be a day off between any of them.
"Probably in your first games [at the Big East tournament] you're going to play better teams,'' West Virginia coach Bob Huggins admitted, a week before he's probably going to have to take that back in praise of whomever the Mountaineers draw in the NCAA tournament. "And you don't have the preparation that you have in the NCAA tournament or the rest that you have in the NCAA tournament. Yeah, in a lot of ways it's harder.''
Not that that's a bad thing, mind you. Whether you win this Big East tournament or are eliminated a game or two in, playing an event of this magnitude and this degree of difficulty can't help but be some sort of preparation for the main event a week later. No, a Big East team hasn't won the NCAA tournament in the last six years, but that's a lousy litmus test. Just because a league doesn't have the best team in the country doesn't mean it's not populated by the best teams in the land.
And unless the Big East tournament kills you, it can make you stronger.
"It's great practice in getting ready for what you're going to face in the NCAA tournament,'' Thoroughman said. "Of course, the one [advantage] the NCAA tournament has over the Big East is what you're playing for.''
Reach Dave Hickman at 304-348-1734 or dphickm...@aol.com.
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