Big East December '25 Thread | Page 13 | The Boneyard
.-.

Big East December '25 Thread

freescooter said:
Seems like we will be wanting to cancel games like in baseball because we’re better off not playing than winning!

The NBE is bad this year. Worse than 2023 when it was a 3 bid league. I would guess UConn goes 18-2 or something.

Nelson, how come the NBE isn’t gaming the system like other leagues are? Maybe the Catholics are keeping it honest?
Expand ...

The Big East is consistently third in average attendance among the majors, but unlike the SEC or Big 10, the Big East doesn’t give away a huge chunk of its gate to free or low price student tickets. The Big East schools need to sell actual tickets because they need the revenue, so they schedule more mid majors. The Big East simply can’t get away with the number of low majors of the P2 and Big 12.

The Big East front office deserves a lot of blame for not pressuring the ratings services and NET to impose a bigger penalty on SEC/Big 10/Big 12 teams for playing really bad teams OOC.
 
nelsonmuntz said:
You keep feeding the troll.
Expand ...
Oh so this is you?

Oslo Norway Europe GIF
 
nelsonmuntz said:
The Big East is consistently third in average attendance among the majors, but unlike the SEC or Big 10, the Big East doesn’t give away a huge chunk of its gate to free or low price student tickets. The Big East schools need to sell actual tickets because they need the revenue, so they schedule more mid majors. The Big East simply can’t get away with the number of low majors of the P2 and Big 12.

The Big East front office deserves a lot of blame for not pressuring the ratings services and NET to impose a bigger penalty on SEC/Big 10/Big 12 teams for playing really bad teams OOC.
Expand ...
Oh Val, you’re doing your best
 
nelsonmuntz said:
Or maybe the other power conferences are padding their power ratings running the score up on terrible teams:

Conference RPI - 2026 Men's College Basketball | WarrenNolan.com

2026 Men's College Basketball Conference RPI (Rating Percentage Index): A Ranking of Every Conference Based on the Average RPI of the Teams in Each Conference
www.warrennolan.com www.warrennolan.com
Expand ...
When I clicked on the link it brought up a chart showing the Big East as the third highest conference and Creighton as our best team with an RPI of 60.
Credibility absent?
 
.-.
freescooter said:
Seems like we will be wanting to cancel games like in baseball because we’re better off not playing than winning!

The NBE is bad this year. Worse than 2023 when it was a 3 bid league. I would guess UConn goes 18-2 or something.

Nelson, how come the NBE isn’t gaming the system like other leagues are? Maybe the Catholics are keeping it honest?
Expand ...
You must have no knowledge of the Jesuits............keeping it honest? Please. Remember, "the end justifies the means".
 
Scrutineer said:
When I clicked on the link it brought up a chart showing the Big East as the third highest conference and Creighton as our best team with an RPI of 60.
Credibility absent?
Expand ...
Creighton is 3-0 and we're 2-0 in conference. So I assume that's their criteria.
 
HuskyHawk said:
The conference sucks. That's the truth of it. I'm glad to see Seton Hall playing well, and Nova showing signs of life. St. Johns is what you get with a team of mercenaries, a disjointed mess. Marquette and Creighton, normally the two most consistent programs along with UConn, are terrible.
Expand ...
A bunch of problems. Hopefully Nova can continue pulling its weight because St. John’s is a massive flop right now.

Most of the mid section isn’t horrible per se, but not good enough either to reliably separate from each other. Even Seton Hall is giving me questions based on last night.

Creighton is the most annoying though, played horribly throughout the non-con only to immediately adjust to their actual talent level in Big East play. Not a killer if they can make the tourney, but they nuked their metrics hard enough that they will be capped at a certain ceiling throughout the year. Basically playing upwards slowly.
 
HuskyHawk said:
The conference sucks. That's the truth of it. I'm glad to see Seton Hall playing well, and Nova showing signs of life. St. Johns is what you get with a team of mercenaries, a disjointed mess. Marquette and Creighton, normally the two most consistent programs along with UConn, are terrible.
Expand ...
The conference is clearly down this season but it doesn't suck.
 
.-.
superjohn said:
The conference is clearly down this season but it doesn't suck.
Expand ...
Perhaps suck[/i] is a bit strong, but the top of our conference (outside of us) and the middle of our conference has quite a long way to go in order to claim to be a somewhat competitive with their counterparts in the conferences we claim to be peers with in men's basketball this season.

The B-12 has Arizona and Iowa St as clearly top 5 teams, Houston and BYU are legitimate top 10 to 12 teams while Kansas and Texas Tech are clearly top 25 teams. Baylor, Oklahoma St and Arizona St are also at least equal to all but the top 3 or 4 teams in the Big East this year.

The B1G has Michigan and Purdue as top 5 teams, Michigan St is a top ten, Nebraska and Illinois are top 20 while USC, Iowa, UCLA and Indiana are at least equal to all but the top couple of BE schools not named UConn.

The SEC may not currently have any top 6-8 teams, but there are likely 10 schools in that conference who would be the second best school in the Big East.

The ACC has been down, but still, if we were to cancel UConn with Duke (I hate typing that), who then does the BE have to compete with Louisville, UNC or Virginia? With that, Clemson, Cal, Miami and NC St would be in a grouping with the third to fifth best BE teams.

If people want to pretend that this year's BE is comparable to other P-5 conferences I want to know what they're smoking. We would need to remove the bottom three teams and replace them with a team ranked 10-12, a team ranked 18-20 and a team ranked 22-24 to call this a legitimate P-5 conference.
 
Last edited:
FfldCntyFan said:
Perhaps suck>/i] is a bit strong, but the top of our conference (outside of us) and the middle of our conference has quite a long way to go in order to claim to be a somewhat competitive with their counterparts in the conferences we claim to be peers with in men's basketball this season.

The B-12 has Arizona and Iowa St as clearly top 5 teams, Houston and BYU are legitimate top 10 to 12 teams while Kansas and Texas Tech are clearly top 25 teams. Baylor, Oklahoma St and Arizona St are also at least equal to all but the top 3 or 4 teams in the Big East this year.

The B1G has Michigan and Purdue as top 5 teams, Michigan St is a top ten, Nebraska and Illinois are top 20 while USC, Iowa, UCLA and Indiana are at least equal to all but the top couple of BE schools not named UConn.

The SEC may not currently have any top 6-8 teams, but there are likely 10 schools in that conference who would be the second best school in the Big East.

The ACC has been down, but still, if we were to cancel UConn with Duke (I hate typing that), who then does the BE have to compete with Louisville, UNC or Virginia? With that, Clemson, Cal, Miami and NC St would be in a grouping with the third to fifth best BE teams.

If people want to pretend that this year's BE is comparable to other P-5 conferences I want to know what they're smoking. We would need to remove the bottom three teams and replace them with a team ranked 10-12, a team ranked 18-20 and a team ranked 22-24 to call this a legitimate P-5 conference.
Expand ...
It's down because Marquette sucks this season and Creighton is way down and St. John's has been a huge disappointment. We're an 11 team conference getting compared to conferences with 16-18 teams. ACC has 17 teams and a lot of them are dreadful.
 
I look at the Big East and see 5 teams that could beat us and 3 more that could be competitive road games. The problem Is the lack of other elite teams. It's not a conference of tomato cans though
 
www.espn.com

Men's Bracketology: Vanderbilt is exceeding expectations as a projected 2-seed

The unbeaten Commodores weren't expected to be this good this season, but we could very well see history made in March.
www.espn.com

Lunardi says 5 bids as of today w/ Butler among the last 4 in and creighton among the next 4 out. is it possible to get all 6 in? i wouldnt have thought so heading into conference play. what would that look like? UConn finishes in 1st (18-2 or 17-3) followed by the next 5 all bunched up in the standings (between 15-5 and 13-7), and then a big drop off to the bottom 5 teams?
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: MJ1
superjohn said:
It's down because Marquette sucks this season and Creighton is way down and St. John's has been a huge disappointment. We're an 11 team conference getting compared to conferences with 16-18 teams. ACC has 17 teams and a lot of them are dreadful.
Expand ...
So comparing the BE with a conference that has 50 percent more members, our second best team should be roughly equivalent to their third best. Our fourth best with their sixth best.

Please tell me how our second and fourth best teams would matchup with the third and sixth best in the B-12? The B1G? The SEC? The ACC would be the only reasonable comparison, but even there we fall short by a very significant margin.
 
FfldCntyFan said:
So comparing the BE with a conference that has 50 percent more members, our second best team should be roughly equivalent to their third best. Our fourth best with their sixth best.
Expand ...
If that's the way you want to spin it, I think the Big East would be comparable to the ACC and we've said a million times this is a really bad year for the Big East.

Also, UConn is better than Duke so you can stop pretending they're the same.
 
.-.
superjohn said:
If that's the way you want to spin it, I think the Big East would be comparable to the ACC and we've said a million times this is a really bad year for the Big East.

Also, UConn is better than Duke so you can stop pretending they're the same.
Expand ...

I put this together, current info (Kenpom updated while I was creating it). I don't necessarily agree with the two, but it gives a reasonable picture of where all conference members sit, relative to each other. Sorted by average ranking among all D-1 schools. BE in blue, ACC in green (note, I couldn't get excel to capitalize the C in UConn).

Screenshot 2025-12-31 184924.jpg


Ken Pom

Evan Miya

We are behind the ACC as well (although not as far as we are behind the other conferences). Personally I'm not worried about us, but I don't have a lot of confidence in the rest of the conference.
 
Don't look now, but one of the Big East NCAAT hopefuls, Villanova, is losing at home 56-51 to DePaul with under 8 minutes. This will be a resume painful loss if results hold.

Will DePaul make the NCAAT? No.
Will DePaul finish in the top half the Big East? Really don't think so.

Will DePaul be a pain in the ass to other Big East teams? Yes
 
.-.
gsmooth said:
Don't look now, but one of the Big East NCAAT hopefuls, Villanova, is losing at home 56-51 to DePaul with under 8 minutes. This will be a resume painful loss if results hold.

Will DePaul make the NCAAT? No.
Will DePaul finish in the top half the Big East? Really don't think so.

Will DePaul be a pain in the ass to other Big East teams? Yes
Expand ...
Villanova couldn't hit water if they fell out of a boat.

And it's not the great Depaul defense either.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Online statistics

Members online
390
Guests online
4,320
Total visitors
4,710
Totals may include hidden visitors.

Forum statistics

Threads
166,100
Messages
4,467,008
Members
10,342
Latest member
Cecily


Top Bottom