Big East Basketball: Buy or sell UConn, Marquette, Villanova and Xavier?

We’re at that time of the year when terms like bracketology will start being used commonly in the world of college basketball. While that will be in our minds, that’s not our explicit focus today. We’ll be thinking about a few teams that could or should make the NCAA Tournament, but our explicit focus is on Big East Basketball, a conference that’s given plenty of excitement in recent years.

Villanova has dominated this league since it restructured nearly a decade ago, but this year seems to indicate that that run of success is finished. There’s a flurry of strength in this league, and the conference could put a handful of teams in the NCAA Tournament once more. However, we’re not looking today at which teams are going to explicitly make the NCAA Tournament, we’re instead focusing on who among these eleven schools are legitimate contenders.

Teams that make it to the Sweet Sixteen or Elite Eight and lose aren’t necessarily failures; any mid-major program would take a run like that for their school. But we’re talking about the Big East, a conference that has seen Villanova cut down the nets twice in the last seven years, while programs like Connecticut, Providence, Seton Hall, and Xavier have had varying levels of success very recently. This is a power conference with some schools with the potential to make serious noise in the Big Dance.

We’re going to take a closer look at six schools in the Big East; the six that look most like potential contenders in the conference. There’s no guarantee that these are the top six teams in the league, but they seem to be the programs with the most potential based on what we expected in the preseason and what we’ve seen in the first two months of the actual season. Let’s get right into our dives into these teams, proceeding alphabetically and indicating if we’d buy or sell them as legitimate contenders.