Big East Bracketology: Who’s in, who’s out? – 3 teams vie for top seed
Big East Bracketology update sees Creighton, Seton Hall and Villanova are vying for conference supremacy while Butler and Marquette are tournament teams.
For the majority of the season, the Big East has been waiting in the wings as team-after-team leaped around the Associated Press Top 25 polls. It has been a crazy season, to say the least in college basketball and with all of the changes it’s been anyone’s guess as to who is the team to beat.
However, according to ESPN’s Joe Lunardi’s latest projections, the Big East could possibly get as many seven teams into the NCAA Tournament. Only the Big Ten (ten teams) could have more members in the big dance this Spring.
With just ten eams total in the conference, a 70 percent acceptance rate would look great for the conference. Let’s take a look at the teams that are on solid footing, who still has work to do and who has no shot.
Going dancing
Of the seven teams, five have all but guaranteed their entrance into this year’s field. Seton Hall, Creighton (who is heating up) and Villanova are in a three-way battle — separated by one and a half games — for first place and all are above the 20-win threshold. Marquette and Butler have also done well enough to feel comfortable about their chances of playing meaningful basketball in March.
The next two programs, Providence and Xavier, currently find themselves among college basketball’s bubble members.
The Friars are on a three-game winning streak that includes defeats of the Pirates and Golden Eagles, who were both ranked in the top 20 at the time. Their recent run of success placed them in the “Last Four In” according to ESPN.
The Musketeers though lost both of their most recent games against ranked opponents and narrowly got past St. John’s on the road. Xavier began the season as the 19th-ranked team in the country but their roller coaster of a season has them part of Lunardi’s “Last Four Byes”.
No dancing shoes
St. John’s along with the DePaul Blue Demons are on the outside looking in. Both teams had hopes of making it into the tournament this season.
The Johnnies returned Mustapha Heron and LJ Figueroa and brought in David Caraher, Rasheem Dunn and Ian Steere as transfers. Yet, they find themselves barely above .500 and near the bottom of the conference standings.
DePaul started the season on a tear. They won their first nine games, including takedowns of Iowa and Texas Tech. It seemed as if the program was on the verge of ending its 16-year March Madness drought but those dreams came to a crashing end after they won only two of their 14 conference games.
Then there’s Georgetown. Patrick Ewing’s third season was supposed to be the year the Hoyas broke through. After an impressive third-place finish last year and a trip to the NIT with a young roster, things looked to be coming together.
Yet, the team lost two sophomores to mid-season transfers, James Akinjo (who led the team in minutes) and Josh LeBlanc in December after struggling out of the gate. With Mac McClung dealing with injuries, nothing has gone according to plan for this group.
Still, they find themselves on the brink of making it into the NCAA Tournament. Lunardi has them in his “Next Four Out” grouping as of now. Their final four games of the regular season are all against teams likely to be in the tournament. Finishing out with a winning record could be their ticket into the dance.
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