WNIT + CBI = OMG excitement!

With the NIT title game not until tomorrow, and both the men's and women's NCAA Tournaments on hold until Saturday and Sunday, respectively, you might think there's no college basketball tonight. But you'd be wrong! Try to contain your excitement, but tonight features the WNIT semifinals (N.C. State vs. Michigan State, Marquette vs. Colorado) and Game 2 of the best-of-three CBI championship series (Bradley vs. Tulsa). Tulsa won the first game, 73-68 on its home floor, but now the series moves to Peoria, where Bradley will try to tie it up and earn a return trip to Tulsa for a decisive Game 3 on Friday. WOOO!!!! :) And, best of all, you can watch tonight's thrilling CBI action live online for the low, low price of $6.95, which is only $6.95 more than CBS charges to watch the entire NCAA Touranment online!

Comments

[B. Minich]

Brendan: just got word that Jim Larranaga, of George Mason fame, turned down an big offer from Providence and signed an extension with George Mason. Mason beats another school from a major conference! Whooo!!!

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/dcsportsbog/2008/04/larranaga_stays.html

[David K.]

I've never even heard of Providence, so I decided to look up the conference they are in. Big East? Seriously? 16 teams? Man i never paid much attention to bball sure, but 16 teams isn't a conference, its a full blown tournament in and of itself!

[Brendan Loy]

Never even heard of Providence? Didn't know the Big East was 16 teams? Dude, your West Coast Bias is showing! :)

The Big East expanded to 16 teams a couple of years ago, in the wake of the defections of Boston College, Virginia Tech and Miami to the ACC. Since they were losing a lot of their football power, they decided to really bone up on the basketball side, and added a bunch of former Conference USA teams like Cincinnati, Marquette, etc. This is what resulted in C-USA becoming effectively the Memphis Invitational, a mid-major league with one good team, whereas before it had been a borderline power conference. Meanwhile the Big East became ridiculous. This is also why it's silly for Billy Packer to bitch about the conference getting OMG!! EIGHT TEAMS IN THE TOURNAMENT!!, as that's the equivalent of the Pac-10 getting 5 or the ACC getting 6 ... not exactly earth-shattering.

Anyway, you'll be happy to know that Spike Lee agrees with you about the Big East being too big. It was one of the things we talked about while waiting for the interview to start. :)

[B. Minich]

Heh - not sure about the Big East being too big . . . (I am glad the tourney is going back to the whole conference next year, although that is going to be crazy.), but Providence is a charter member - they've been in the Big East longer than Pitt has. Plus, they've pretty much always been a basketball conference - they rejected Penn State in the 80s because they were focusing on basketball (and have always accepted basketball only members, to the point of later accepting Notre Dame's basketball team while ND wanted to keep their football team independent).

While Providence has never been a power, they've been fairly successful over the years, which is why they fired their current coach for not making the NCAAs.

[Andrew]

Meanwhile the Big East became ridiculous.

Eh, I'm not that impressed. The Big East would have a better case of being the best conference top-to-bottom if it had more even scheduling.

[Brendan Loy]

I didn't necessarily mean "ridiculously good"... I left my characterization deliberately vague. :) That said, re: scheduling, every Big East team does play every other Big East team once, plus they play three teams twice. The only realistic way to "balance" it better would be to have a 15-game schedule, where everybody plays everybody just once. You can't exactly have a 30-game round robin. :)

[Andrew]

Obviously, but a better sense of parity and competitiveness would probably be possible if they split the conference into two divisions of eight teams. Then, each team could play a round-robin home-and-home with each team in its own division and two-to-four games against foes from the other divisions (perhaps the inter-divisional matchups would take traditional rivalries into account and make sure they remain intact). The result of that is you can then definitively say a particular division of the Big East is strong or weak, vis-a-vis the other Big East division and other conferences and such.

[B. Minich]

(Is amused by the fact that a thread about the CBI ends up being about the size of the Big East. Yes, I know I started it, but still . . . shows how irrelevant the CBI is.)