Better Know a Conference: Big East

A detailed look at the latest edition of the most enjoyable league in the country

Photo credit: Big East

Better Know a Conference is Buzzer’s league-by-league preview of the 2024-25 season, featuring Bubble Watch-length narrative looks at every team in every major league — and other conferences and mid-majors along the way — in rough order of expected finish.

To read the full series (and start posting on the best college hoops comment section on the Internet!) consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Today: The Big East.

This is a golden age of Big East basketball. Not the golden age, of course — that was the 1980s. Maybe, if you want to indulge the nostalgia of a certain demographic (erm, millennials, hello), you could call it 2007-2013, when the Big East was annually generating memorable regular season weekends, huge postseason allocations, and a steady supply of No. 1 seeds. Then, of course, the league broke up. The Catholic schools won the trademark in the divorce, added a few quality mid-major programs, and struck out on their own, starting a grand countercultural college sports experiment.

The experiment has worked incredibly well; the football-less Big East has thrived. It is almost always the most purely fun organization in the game. The Big East makes perfect cultural sense. It is the right size and shape. The schools are philosophically attuned. Gus Johnson and Bill Raftery are on the call. The fans are die hard, very online, and often quite drunk. They hate each other, but also kind of like each other, too.

Conference realignment and college football has made college sports almost unrecognizable. The Big East stands proudly against the tide.

This would be true even if the league was bad at basketball. You can imagine the same gleeful modern culture springing up around the Big East even if the stakes were slightly more mid-major in nature. But they are not. The conference is routinely one of the best hoops leagues in the country. It has won four of the past eight national titles. It finished second in the KenPom conference rankings a season ago, even as it sent just three teams to the NCAA Tournament (UConn certainly helping the league pump those underlying metrics up), and there are good reasons to expect another highly competitive edition in 2024-25 — starting at the very top.

UConn

It says much about the previous two seasons of UConn basketball that the following statements can be simultaneously true:

1. The 2024-25 Huskies are almost certainly not going to be as good as they were last year, and

2. The 2024-25 Huskies are almost certainly going to be one of the best teams in the country.

A year ago, UConn was one of the most complete and dominant teams in modern college hoops history, the only collective force good enough to make the toppling of Zach Edey look routine. A year before that, other than a strange blip in league play sandwiched between periods of extended excellence, they similarly destroyed all in their path. Dan Hurley is the best coach in the country, running the best stuff, creating the best teams, and it is funny to consider the likely scenario that his program could take a meaningful step back this season and still be one of a handful of favorites to win it all.

Those are the margins created by elite coaching: You don't have to have Donovan Clingan and Stephon Castle, necessarily; you don't have to have Adama Sanogo or Jordan Hawkins or Andre Jackson. If you watch the Huskies play regularly, you know that Hurley and his staff could assemble a group of thoroughly unremarkable mid-major castoffs and still at least compete on a nightly basis in the Big East. Tactically and strategically, they are that far ahead.

But then of course UConn doesn't have unremarkable talent. Indeed, this roster has probably gotten underrated over the summer.