Big East Basketball: Top 50 players from the legendary 2010-11 season

HOUSTON, TX - APRIL 04: The Connecticut Huskies react after defeating the Butler Bulldogs to win the National Championship Game of the 2011 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament by a score of 53-41 at Reliant Stadium on April 4, 2011 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images) /

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HOUSTON, TX – APRIL 04: The Connecticut Huskies react after defeating the Butler Bulldogs to win the National Championship Game of the 2011 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament by a score of 53-41 at Reliant Stadium on April 4, 2011 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images) /

With Big East basketball heading into conference play, let’s take a look back in time at the historical 2010-11 season, as well as the great players in it.

No conference in Division I basketball has gone through bigger highs and lows just in the last decade than the Big East. In the seasons before the realignment, the league sent a ton of teams to the NCAA tournament, finals fours, and even national championships.

Then conference realignment happened, with a number of teams, including Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Louisville, West Virginia, UConn, Cincinnati, South Florida and Notre Dame leaving for various conferences. For a moment, the remaining non-football schools were in limbo, not knowing if the Big East would exist much longer. The seven remaining seven schools added Xavier, Creighton, and Butler to form a 10-team new Big East.

Led the Jay Wright and the Villanova Wildcats, the league has rebounded rather nicely, but will it reach the heights that they did right before the conference split up?

Last season, the ACC conference had a ton of hype coming into the year, with the number of quality teams they had (including a few former Big East teams). There were questions as to whether the conference would send at least 11 or potentially more teams to the NCAA tournament, a record that’s been held by the Big East since 2010-11. It ultimately didn’t happen, but memories of that season started to come to mind.

The reason why I wanted to embark on this project was because of my ties to the Big East. Growing up in Pittsburgh, I rooted for the Panthers like crazy, and back then, we were a national contender under Jamie Dixon.

We never had McDonald’s All-Americans or bonafide NBA talent, but Pittsburgh would grit and grind their way to many wins. The fact that Pitt was the regular season title in the year certainly didn’t hurt things.

While I certainly understand the reasons for the move with respect to the Universities motives, but in retrospect this hurt the basketball program at Pitt, playing and recruiting in a league they just don’t fit in. And with this expecting to be a really bad year in conference play for the Panthers, what better time to go into the history vault for the last time my favorite team was great?

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