Big East Games of Interest: 2015-2016

[whiteandblue77]

With the conferences outside the top 6 laying an egg BE could get 6, ACC and Pac 12 could get 9, and B12 & B10 could be 8 if someone outside those conference's "locks" wins their respective tourneys. With Seton Hall now a 36 rpi they're our 5th lock.

SEC is a crap shoot right now and too early to predict but they'll undoubtedly benefit from the midmajors down this year.

To the rich go the spoils...

[stever20]

With the conferences outside the top 6 laying an egg BE could get 6, ACC and Pac 12 could get 9, and B12 & B10 could be 8 if someone outside those conference's "locks" wins their respective tourneys. With Seton Hall now a 36 rpi they're our 5th lock.

SEC is a crap shoot right now and too early to predict but they'll undoubtedly benefit from the midmajors down this year.

To the rich go the spoils...

what you are saying is IMPOSSIBLE...
ACC 9
P12 9
B12 8
B10 8
BE 6
just there would be 40 spots. that would be 35 of the 36 at larges. SEC has 5 teams.

Georgetown still has to go 10-8 vs the rest of the BE and UConn to have any shot.
Marquette has to go 10-7 vs the Big East the rest of the way to have any shot.

[billyjack]

Sorry for this long post, I haven't proofread it, and it meanders through several ideas...

Couple of games over the last week that caught my attention:
Michigan State winning at Northeastern.
NC State winning at home vs Northeastern.

- - -

So, Michigan State set up a weekend trip to Boston to play Northeastern in 3 sports... men's and women's basketball (2 Spartan wins), and men's ice hockey (NU Huskies won). Interesting that the games were played at 100+ year old Matthews Arena on campus (rather than looking to play at the Garden). Matthews holds 4600 for hockey and 6000 for basketball according to wikipedia. In the MSU games, 3100 fans were there for hockey, and for hoops they sold out arena with 5288 (according to the Boston Globe).

I went to a Friars hockey game at Matthews a couple of years ago. Very old and historic, and the balcony (we sat up there 3 rows back) puts you right over the action... actually we almost got hit with a puck on a clearance, that's how close to the ice we were. Attendance was low, maybe 2k or so. Matthews is on the subway line (above ground there) too.

- - -

Northeastern is in an interesting section of the city... a busy crossroads area... it's in the arts district, right next to the Boston Symphony and Berkley School of Music, with the Museum of Fine Arts a 5 minute walk to the SW. A 5 minute walk to the NW gets you to Fenway Park. Copley Square and the Prudential Center with shopping and nice hotels are a 5 minute walk to the NE (Boston Marathon ends there). The old Back Bay area is a 5 minute walk to the north, some nice restaurants and shopping and old style hotels. To the south and SE the area is struggling. It's about a 10 minute drive to the Boston Garden and North End restaurants. Northeastern is much more a part of the working city compared to BU or BC, and NU's student body is more typically local Mass and New England students.

- - -

So, the other night Northeastern played at NC State. I saw the 2nd half. The Huskies almost won, really would've won except an NC State guard hit an insane amount of 3's mid to late 2nd half without a miss... named Rowan, maybe the kid that St John's had recruited, not sure. Anyway, NC State's offense consisted of this Rowan guy chucking up threes. They had no inside game. Cat Barber at PG made some nice drives to the hoop, often kicking out to Rowan.

Northeastern ran a nice deliberate offense, and got some great looks from 3. They had a lesser inside game, but it was as effective as it needed to be. The game had a bunch of lead changes and was tied with 3 or 4 minutes left, til NC State pulled away on their jump shooting.

The coaches of each team... ok, wow... a Marquette fan at the HLoH has a tagline with an Al McGuire quote, about how teams reflect the attitude and personality of their coach. This was pretty obvious in my opinion in this game...

Northeastern is coached by Bill Coen, a former assistant (liked I'm mentioned several other times) under Al Skinner at URI and BC, on the same staff as Ed Cooley (and O'Shea at Bryant), and the Huskies were very composed the whole time, focused on the task at hand, and played great.

NC State has Mark Gottfried, a serial whiner... the Wolfpack were acting like they won the national title as they held their ground vs Northeastern... constantly jawing, yapping, obnoxious, lazy on defense... whining about not getting fouls called, though their offense was again basically jacking up threes (whereas NU worked the paint much more and had good movement)... the crowd was pretty thin... just an annoying team and coach... and again they were strutting around after a 6 point win over Northeastern.

- - -

I started thinking about the NC State offense and roster, and thought it was a lot like Oliver Purnell's system, and I thought maybe that's how he won at Clemson. Gottfried had a couple of lights-out shooters, otherwise they would've lost. It reminded me of Purnell's DePaul team, praying that Forrest Robinson could go nuts from 3, and playing lazy defense. And weak player development... Providence recruited the NC State big man Abu, but he decided on Gottfried... fine... and we got our Plan B, the great Ben Bentil. The other night, I saw very little from Abu, I mean he didn't suck, but I maybe saw him score one bucket, couple of boards maybe. In fairness, I haven't watched him play much, but no way would I make player swap. [Edit: Abu had 10 pts and 12 rebounds (5 defensive rebounds), on 4-13 shooting, 23 minutes. Double-double, so I'm not being fair to him I guess.]

- - -

Also, all things reconsidered, if we really wanted the Big East to expand into Massachusetts some day, I think under the right circumstances that Northeastern would be the team to take. I originally penciled in Holy Cross, but with the money and expansion that Northeastern is going through right now, maybe in 7-8-9 years the Huskies could be ready (especially if the Colonial Athletic establishes itself as a consistent Top-10 conference).

Sorry for the long post, I just kinda threw a bunch of stuff down on paper here...

[marquette]

In the interest of not turning this into another expansion thread I'll just say I've also been paying attention to Northeastern games over the past couple of years. They have been playing well and are fun to watch.

[gosports1]

they do seem more advanced than BU and more committed than Holy Cross. HC has had over 30 years to ponder their decision not to join the BE and seems very content being where they are

[marquette]

UW looked better than they have their last couple of games, beat a bad Rutgers team by 22. It would be nice if Syracuse could take one over Miami but I don't see it happening.

[stever20]

UW looked better than they have their last couple of games, beat a bad Rutgers team by 22. It would be nice if Syracuse could take one over Miami but I don't see it happening.

Syracuse falls 64-51. Now 4-4 with Boeheim suspended. Must beat Clemson to avoid starting 0-3 with UNC coming in next Saturday. 4-5 since coming back from Atlantis.

[stever20]

Virginia Tech beats NC State 73-68. I know what billyjack said about NC State- man seems so spot on....

[Jet915]

Washington State just beat UCLA. They are now 0-2 in Pac-12, that can't be good for their bubble resume...

[Burrito]

On the ACC board, there was a recap of their OOC schedule. Of the 25 conferences they played against, the ACC had a winning records vs 22 conferences. They tied the BIG 10 and had a losing records vs the Big 12 and the Big East.