There was an eerie feeling in the corridors of Penn Station; fans decked out in all blue with looks of bewilderment. They had just witnessed\u00a0their blue-blooded Duke Blue Devils suffer a defeat to the St. John\u2019s Red Storm, a team who had not won a game in the Big East Conference at the time.<\/p>\n
A question was raised immediately: is this incarnation of the Big East as good as the \u201cOld\u201d Big East?\u00a0Founder of the prestigious\u00a0Kenpom\u00a0computer rankings, Ken Pomeroy, raised this very question.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen an 0-11 Big East team beats the preseason title favorite, you have to at least be open to the idea that the new Big East\u00a0is as good as the old Big East,\u201d Pomeroy said, via twitter.<\/p>\n
This game did not create\u00a0this\u00a0debate, but it\u00a0radically brought it to the forefront of sports media. Now I\u2019m not here to tell you why the new Big East is as good as its predecessor, but the new league is definitely\u00a0at its strongest since realignment.<\/p>\n
\u201cSt. John\u2019s strong showing Saturday was reflective of the conference\u2019s depth and talent, even at the foot of the league where the Red Storm currently occupy last place,\u201d Patrick Brennan, a reporter for Cincinnati.com, said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rise of the New Big East<\/strong><\/p>\n When the Catholic 7\u00a0broke off of the\u00a016-team\u00a0conference,\u00a0the prevailing thought of the sports world was there will never be anything like the Big East Conference, ever again.\u00a0Immediately the debate shifted to the Catholic 7 being labeled a strong mid-major league. Which was bolstered by the additions\u00a0of mid-major powerhouses Xavier, Butler, and Creighton.<\/p>\n In the years since, the new version of the conference has been consistently one of the top basketball conferences in the nation, most notably backed up in Villanova\u2019s national championship\u00a0in 2016, as well as sending\u00a070 percent of its teams to the NCAA tournament last March.<\/p>\n Fast forward to this season, and the Big East is again among the best conferences top to bottom. A league that is headlined by two top-5 teams is\u00a0one where any team could win any night.<\/p>\n Which brings us back to St. John\u2019s, the historic program from Jamaica, New York, who has seen better days, to put it politely. Since the Johnnies named all-time great Chris Mullin head coach, New York\u2019s team has been on track to finish at or around the bottom of the Big East every season.<\/p>\n St. John\u2019s followed up the upset of Duke by knocking off No. 1 Villanova, in Philadelphia, Pa. The Johnnies were the worst team in the conference with 11 straight losses to open league play, and now there is talk of them somehow making the NIT based on their huge wins this past week.<\/p>\n The\u00a0strength of a conference is measured by how solid the bottom teams are, and whether it is Georgetown, DePaul, or St. John\u2019s, each have showed in the past why they need to be taken seriously\u00a0by the rest of the league. Because of this the Big East\u2019s\u00a0Kenpom\u00a0and RPI have soared this season.\u00a0Ranking second\u00a0in RPI and\u00a0third in\u00a0Kenpom\u00a0out of every conference in the country.<\/p>\n The new Big East is one of the top conferences in the country from top to bottom. Each day, respect for the conference grows more and more by its actions on the court. Fans of this conference claim that their favorite teams do not get the recognition they deserve, but by winning the games in front of them, the Big East is putting itself on the map.<\/p>\n J.P. Proulx can be reached at jeanpaul.proulx@student.shu.edu or on Twitter @ProulxCenter.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was an eerie feeling in the corridors of Penn Station; fans decked out in all blue with looks of bewilderment. They had just witnessed\u00a0their blue-blooded Duke Blue Devils suffer a defeat to the St. John\u2019s Red Storm, a team who had not won a game in the Big East Conference at the time. A…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3936,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[16,25,28,29,26,27],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ncaab","tag-big-east","tag-college-basketball","tag-duke","tag-ken-pomeroy","tag-st-johns","tag-villanova"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3936"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}