NCAA Basketball: Best Players from each Big East/AAC team of the 21st Century (2000-2018)
By Logan Butts
In the penultimate piece of our Best of the Century series, we are taking a trip to the Northeast (and beyond) with a look in at the Big East and AAC’s best players of the century.
No top-level conference has seen as much team-based upheaval this century as the Big East and the American Athletic Conference (AAC).
The Great Conference Realignment and Migration movement of this decade affected these two conferences more than any other major ones. The AAC didn’t even exist technically, at least with this moniker, if you were to look back more than five years. The AAC and the “new” Big East rose out of the ashes of the “old” Big East, once considered one of THE elite basketball conferences.
Now, in its place, are two conferences that are not really considered as a part of the “Power Five” due to football reasons and other things, but they aren’t really thought of as mid-major conferences either.
Despite being home to some of the best teams of this era of college basketball (Villanova is probably THE team of the current decade, Wichita State and Butler have fielded some of the most memorable squads of the last 10 years), they are lost somewhere in the middle of “Power Five” and mid-major.
Because of that, I decided to pair them together for this series. I am not sure if that is totally fair, but it felt right. On to the teams.