This is Better Know a Conference, Buzzer’s annual preview series. Between now and Nov. 2, we’ll be writing the detailed stories — a mix of roster breakdowns and overarching narratives, broken down into silly tiers — of the 2026-27 season to come.
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The Big East is going to get better. The reasons for this are simple, and we wrote about them in detail over the summer, so it’s probably best to use that post as a primer rather than restate the obvious again …
… but it is, nonetheless, the story here. The Big East’s unique position in college basketball has always felt tenuous. Since it formed in 2013, the leftovers of an old Big East whose key members decided football mattered more banding together in solidarity, the post-schism league has been a yearly outlier, an experiment: Can you survive, and thrive, as a hoops-only power conference?
Every trend in college athletics suggested the answer was no. But the Big East made it work, and then became reliably fun and culturally indispensable along the way, and now — thanks to the House settlement and the guaranteed share of revenue (most) Big East teams don’t need to allocate to greedy Division I football — can suddenly compete with the most moneyed conferences in the sport.
The result is a conference with more potential tournament teams than at any point in the past few seasons. For as enjoyable as the Gus Johnson/Bill Raftery broadcasts always are, for as much as we enjoy John Fanta’s Twitter spaces with lunatic Providence fans, the league has managed more than three tournament bids just once in the past three seasons. A year ago, its bubble prospects were decided earlier than most. This year should be much, much different. Let’s get into it:
The national title contender tier (singular)
Connecticut Huskies
In the past four NCAA Tournaments, the Connecticut men’s basketball team has won 17 games and lost two. One could read this piece of information without any further context and it would still be mind-blowing; you don’t have to be a logician to know there are a couple of national titles implied in there somewhere. But even the losses are crazy. Both of them were inflicted by the respective tournament’s eventual champion. Both opponents were No. 1-seeded juggernauts. Both games were so much closer than anyone expected.
Point being: Even in the defeats — in the most disappointing moments of a peerless four-year run, and down to the tiny possession-by-possession margins that decide them, even in the desperate scraping and scrapping against the overwhelming force of Michigan last April — there has been nothing one could use to reasonably criticize Dan Hurley. Even when they lose, you come away impressed.
So it is no surprise to see the Huskies atop the Big East preview tier/rankings yet again. This is the world we have lived in for a while, as it seems we will for the foreseeable future. (It might be slightly more of a surprise that St. John’s, not to mention the rest of a juiced-up top third of the league, feels a bit further behind than usual.) This has been the most comprehensively competent program, both tactically and strategically, for college basketball’s past half-decade, and nothing about the macro picture before the 2026-27 season suggests that’s about to stop.
With his typical combination of retention, development, and a dash of the portal, Hurley has put together another fantastic squad, the kind that causes internal debates about who, exactly, the best player actually is. Buzzer’s first instinct all offseason has been to anoint Braylon Mullins, the breakout sophomore candidate with the perfect jumper who eschewed the lottery in June, who looks visibly capable of averaging 24 points a night. But is that disrespectful to Silas Demary, who was already an all-Big East first teamer and one of the best defenders in the league? Maybe a little bit!
And then there’s Na’jai Hines, whose immediate defensive dominance carried Seton Hall on that end of the floor last year, and who is already probably a better defender than the post-Hurleyfied peak version of Tarris Reed (even if Hines lacks a lot of the auto-bucket technical skills that made Reed so potent under the rim offensively). Duke transfer Nik Khamenia won’t be Alex Karaban in all kinds of ways — no one would be — but in terms of replacing that profile of player, among any transfer available in the spring of 2026, could UConn’s staff have possibly done any better?
As usual, the Huskies also have one elite freshman coming through. Five-star wing Colben Landrew will likely play meaningful Mullins-esque minutes off the bench, with a view to a starring role later in the season and beyond. He probably offers more raw talent and upside than Jayden Ross, but Ross was also quietly better than you probably remember (119.8 offensive rating, a 2.7 steals rate, 62.4 percent true shooting, 25-of-64 from 3) and has the advantage of veterancy in a program obsessed with it. And all of this is before mentioning Solo Ball, a star of last year’s team, who thanks to the five-in-five rule can return from his injury midseason without burning his last year of eligibility. Nice little bonus there.
(We should also probably mention Nils Machowski here. Machowski, who shot the lights out at Wofford last season, also has a reputation as a plus perimeter defender. He won’t need to play a ton to be happy, but will have a chance to be really useful, especially until Ball returns.)
If there is one minor flaw in this roster build, it’s in the frontcourt, where UConn lost incumbent center Eric Reibe to USC. Keeping Reed’s multi-year backup around to play behind yet another transfer was never going to happen, especially with all the money being spent on centers in the portal, but the departure means Hines has to a) stay on the floor a lot and/or b) former Stanford reserve center Oskar Giltay has to soak up minutes if he can’t. UConn has never bought in on the ultra-big or two-center lineup trend of the past couple of seasons, and doesn’t look likely to now. But having the 6-foot-8 Karaban’s mix of size and intelligence and floor-stretching was a cheat code that made such trend-chasing unnecessary. Even in the title game, Karaban had 11 rebounds, eight defensive, against the freaking Michigan frontcourt, all while attempting 10 3s on the other end. UConn will miss him every night — but especially against the very best teams in the sport.
Good news: UConn is one of the very best teams in the sport. Whatever qualms you have on the margins, you can bet on Hurley to buffer them out, and in any case there aren’t many qualms to have. This is the best roster in the Big East by some margin. It is almost impossible to improve on a 17-2 postseason record in four years. This group will enter next March fully expecting to pull it off.
The Carl Johnson tier
St. John’s Red Storm
In short:
This may seem like a counterintuitive emotion to have about previewing St. John’s, at least these days. The Red Storm are, after all, 36-4 in the Big East in the past two seasons, consecutive outright conference champs. After years of relative irrelevance, Red Storm fans have an icon as their coach and an obvious wealth of NIL money to spend. These are the glory days.
It’s just that, despite the success and the immaculate vibes, for the past couple of seasons previewing St. John’s has been tricky. It has been an exercise in reconciling what feel like obvious roster holes and limitations — real doubts about whether Rick Pitino and his staff have maximized the money they’ve been given to spend — with the assurance that whatever the problems, Pitino will fix them, and fix them so well you forget about them altogether by, like, January.
Never has this been more the case than right now.
