Selection Sunday 2024 was not king to the Big East. While Dan Hurley’s UConn Huskies grabbed the No. 1 overall seed, not much else went right for the conference. Marquette found its way onto the two-line and Creighton grabbed a three-seed, but Seton Hall and St. John’s had their bubble burst and suddenly the Big East was a three-bid league.
Heading into the 2025 conference tournament, the Big East is projected to send five teams to the NCAA Tournament, but nothing is guaranteed for a conference that is becoming undervalued by the selection committee. So, if the league wants to ensure itself five or even six bids into March Madness, a Big East bid-stealer might be the way.
In a top-heavy 11-team league, it can be difficult to identify the dark horse, but anything can happen when the lights get bright at Madison Square Garden. St. John’s is the favorite and UConn is the two-time defending national champs, but one of these three teams might be able to pull an upset and punch their ticket to the big dance.
Slowly but surely, Ed Cooley is turning Georgetown around. The Hoyas finished seventh in the conference at 8-12 but at 17-14 overall, they’re well outside of the bubble. The team’s at-large chances all but disappeared in a mid-February loss to Butler when 6-foot-10 freshman center Thomas Sorber went out for the season. However, there is still hope for a shocking Big East title run out of the Hoyas.
While Cooley only won the Big East Tournament once at Providence and never made it further than the Sweet 16, he knows what it takes to win in March and prioritized it when he arrived in DC. In back-to-back transfer portal classes, Cooley added Jayden Epps, Micah Peavy, and Malik Mack to build arguably the best three-guard backcourt in the Big East.
Peavy, the fifth-year senior who spent three years at TCU before heading to Georgetown, leads the team in scoring at 16.9 points a game and has scored 20+ points in seven of the Hoyas last nine games. If he stays hot and gets help from Epps and Mack, Georgetown could be a bid-stealer this week at MSG.
When it becomes win-or-go-home basketball, sometimes all a team needs is to get hot from three for a week and they can find themselves in the NCAA Tournament. So, it’s not a bad idea to back a team that shoots 39.8% from beyond the arc, the second-best mark in the entire country, and converts on 81.1% of its free-throw opportunities, also second-best. That team is Kyle Neptune’s Villanova Wildcats.
Neptune has yet to make the NCAA Tournament since taking over for Jay Wright, and if he misses out again, Villanova could be ready to move on. Desperation paired with light’s out shooting, could make the Wildcats a dangerous bunch.
Eric Dixon was a unanimous First-Team All-Big East selection and at 23.6 points a game on 47/43/83 shooting splits, he’s the most lethal scorer in the conference. Wooga Poplar has big-time March Madness experience from his Final Four run with Miami, and Jhamir Brickus is a talented distributor hitting nearly half of his threes. Villanova doesn’t have a shortage of talent, so if Neptune can figure out how to win big games all of a sudden, then he could stumble into a Big East title.
Sean Miller led Xavier to a 27-win season in his first year at the helm, but the Musketeers took a step in the wrong direction last year. Now, with a strong close to the regular season winning seven-straight games, Xavier has played itself back onto the bubble at 21-10 (13-7). The Musketeers could be the fifth-team to come out of the Big East, but Seton Hall was in a similar position a year ago and got left out on Selection Sunday, so the Big East Tournament will be massive for Miller’s group.
As the No. 4 seed, Xavier will draw a first-round matchup with Marquette, and Shaka Smart’s group won’t be an easy out. However, led by fifth-year forward Zach Freemantle and transfer guard Ryan Conwell, the Musketeers get to the free throw line consistently, defend well, and most importantly, end defensive possessions after just one shot, boasting a 94th percentile defensive rebound rate according to CBBanalytics.com.
One Quad 1 win in the Big East Tournament could clinch an at-large bid for Xavier, but the red-hot Musketeers may not stop there. With overtime losses to top seeds St. John’s and UConn, this team has proven it can hang with the best the Big East has to offer.