Bracketology Losers: Lumps of coal this Christmas for the Pac-12 and SEC
BIG EAST
Well, this is awkward.
The first league that we are highlighting at Bracketology Losers didn’t really have a loser. Sometimes a league defies all the odds and, as a collective unit, does not stumble at all during the week. The Big East wasn’t perfect in Week 7, but they were pretty close.
The ten affiliate members of the league played a total of 18 games this week and they won all but one of them. The lone team to lose a game last week was Providence. The Friars have had a lot of trouble in the early going, but they bounced back from a midweek loss to Florida and ran Texas out of their own building on Saturday.
Nine (!!!) Big East teams received top-25 votes this week. That's pretty darn impressive and goes to show that nobody really knows what to expect once conference play arrives.
— Lukas Harkins (@hardwiredsports) December 23, 2019
Spots 3-through-9 are so jumbled right now.
The Big East is arguably the best league in the country, top to bottom. They may not have a team in the Top 10 of the national polls, but even their worst team—Providence—still has some NCAA Tournament hopes. Not many conferences can make that same claim.
Now, if we really want to get nitpicky, we can maybe pinpoint Georgetown and Marquette as relative losers in the Big East. Of their four combined victories, the best opponent was probably North Dakota State. They only qualify as losers insofar as they simply added fluff to their resume instead of something more substantial.
Meanwhile, the rest of the league was out slaying giants. Kansas, Maryland, Arizona, and Purdue were all among the casualties of the Big East’s big week. Joining them were other teams from the Big Ten, Pac-12, and Big 12.
Those are very valuable victories that will help teams distinguish themselves from their conference counterparts.
There are only three more non-conference games to be played among the Big East teams: Georgetown hosts American in a crosstown game in the nation’s capital; Marquette squares off with Central Arkansas and 7-footer Hayden Koval; and Butler tussles with Louisiana-Monroe.
The Big East conference season starts next Monday when Xavier travels to the City of Brotherly Love to take on Villanova, while DePaul looks to justify the hype surrounding them when banged-up Seton Hall comes to town.
The next league under the microscope also had a mostly blemish-free week, although the reigning champions did stumble.