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Tuesday, May 14, 2024
The Big East is getting by just fine. Here is how good the Big East has been so far this year: nine of its 10 teams are so far undefeated. Villanova is 5-0. So are Providence and Creighton. Xavier and Seton Hall are 4-0. Georgetown, St. John’s and Butler are 3-0. Shoot, even DePaul is 2-0.
Doug McDermott and many of his friends have departed, but we know now that it was way too soon to write off a Creighton program that was plenty successful even before the glorious McDermott era.
Green Bay figures to present match up problems for much of the Horizon League. How far can the Phoenix’s size take the team in 2011-12?
For Detroit it was part big man in the middle and part penetrating guards and part taking Green Bay’s leading scorer out of his game. All of this added up to a 62-53 win for the Titans in the Horizon League Championship quarter-final game. The nightcap was similar to the first game only this time it was Milwaukee scoring the first basketball and going wire-to-wire to win 82-75 over Cleveland State.
Everybody’s doing it. Everybody denies it, but everybody’s doing it. At this time of the year, every coaching staff in America is scrutinizing its remaining schedule. Can we win our conference? Can we get a conference tournament bye? Can we get an at-large bid to one tournament to another?
The Wisconsin-Green Bay team may not have read this space recently, as we had long decided that the Horizon regular season belongs to Butler. In fact, the only question that remains in the mind of this writer is whether Butler will lose a single game, either in the Horizon regular season or in a conference tournament in which it will need to win but twice, both games at home.
Coming into the weekend just past, with Butler a perfect 5-0, Wisconsin-Green Bay and Wisconsin-Milwaukee each had one loss, Cleveland State had two, and Wright State had three. And predictably, Butler stayed perfect, taking care of business this weekend in Chicago, beating Loyola and Illinois-Chicago; also predictably, Wright State took care of business in its lone game at Detroit, still stuck on three losses. So there was Cleveland State on its annual brutal trek through Wisconsin, needing two wins to be tied for second and a split to stay close; it got neither.
If you’re inferring some annoyance on the part of this writer with schools scheduling “cupcakes,” well, you’re inferring correctly. In addition to Detroit’s game this past week with Aquinas, Jimmy Collins’ vaunted UIC team played D-II Lewis College (a school I’d never heard of), and on its upcoming three-game home stand, Cleveland State will play both D-III La Roche College and D-III Notre Dame College (that’s not the Notre Dame we all know and love – the one CSU should be playing). If any of these schools find themselves on the wrong side of the bubble for an at-large NCAA bid (or for an NIT bid), they need look no further than their own schedules to learn why.
Butler Bulldogs have completed the first portion of their non-conference schedule undefeated, and will bring a 5-0 record into Wolstein Center Thursday night to face preseason Horizon favorite Cleveland State.
