According to a March 2015 headline in USA Today, the 2015 NCAA Tournament exposed the "overrated" Big East. In the aftermath of top-seeded Villanova's disappointing exit against North Carolina State, The New York Post similarly declared that the tournament had delivered a "jarring indictment" against the "Big Least." These outlets weren't alone in their pessimistic attitudes; in fact, the majority of national media seemed convinced that after the conference realignments of 2013, the new Big East had failed to live up to its billing as a major conference. The murmuring of conventional wisdom was almost audible, that the Catholic Seven's Big East is a competitive failure.
The conventional wisdom is wrong.
Absolutely, the Big East has yet to reestablish itself, and this should be unsurprising. The conference was gutted by the loss of so many significant basketball schools, departed in pursuit of huge football money. Even so, the Big East is far from as poor as the national coverage of the conference is. Mainstream sports media paints the new league desperately treading water to survive, far behind the "real" power conferences. Should this be the case, the statistics would surely bear this out, but do they? In fact, they overwhelmingly proclaim the opposite.
Begin with winning percentage, and the Big East is the fourth-strongest conference in the nation for the last two seasons. Keep in mind, though, that weak opponents are not factored into winning percentage; enter RPI, or Ratings Percentage Index, a tool designed to weight a team's rating to account for the quality of opposing teams. According to CBS calculations of RPI, the Big East also finishes fourth in its 2013-14 debut season, but finishes higher at second in 2014-15.
Again, the conference keeps pace with the other major leagues of college basketball, never falling out of the top four. To explain this away, the USA Today article makes the case that the conference suffers from a lack of top teams, and the large number of mid-level teams makes it seem better than it is; it cites Pomeroy rating, which rates teams based on the expected record their points scored and allowed would predict. The article suggests that the weakness of the conference robbed Villanova of necessary experience, since they won only one game against a team in Pomeroy's top 20. That stat is true, but cutting off at the top 20 seems unnecessarily exclusive. Considering that three other Big East teams were deposited between 20 and 30, a detail conveniently ignored nationally, the argument that the conference is middle-heavy is much weaker in context.
On top of that, the conference might even be under-appreciated on its head-on record, considering signature wins over Notre Dame and North Carolina, teams from the "better" ACC, and single-digit losses to Final Four sides Wisconsin and Duke.
So where did sports media come up with this "Big Least" idea?
That part of the question is simple, because it's the only part of the conference record that actually fits that name: the NCAA Tournament.
In 2015's tournament, six Big East teams played eleven games and won five, or one fewer than eventual champion Duke won on its own. It wouldn't fool anyone to call this a good performance for the conference; it wasn't. The problem with judging the conference based on this, though, is that those losses are the point of the tournament.
Tournament viewers watch to see upsets, and in a small enough sample size we've seen all kinds of crazy outcomes. If the point is to see the best team win, a tournament full of one-game playoffs is begging for an underdog to get in the way. Invariably, at least a few underdogs survive a round or two, and sometimes a conference suffers a lot of losses in a short time. Conferences go 5W-6L in a week routinely, and it will happen to some conference nearly every year at tournament time, so maybe it's time to stop seeing the good year as the outlier and start seeing the bad week as one.
When a conference plays 125 regular-season games and wins 75.2 percent of them, having a bad week doesn't prove it's secretly weak; flukes happen. It's time to be fair to the Big East, because this year, it could happen to you.
