[PaintTouches]Which conference is best at the top?

[PaintTouchesSays]

Which conference is best at the top?

This is weird. I see probably 10 separate links a day on Twitter about bubbles and bubble teams and who might be dancing and who might be pouting and, for the second consecutive year, scroll right on past them. Marquette is headed straight for the gym, so there’s not much catching up I need to […]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=painttouches.com&blog=28348875&post=13243&subd=painttouches&ref=&feed=1" width="1" height="1" />

Source: Which conference is best at the top?

[UticaBusBarn]

Well done ... send this on to Big East Headquarters. Maybe they might get someone at ESPN to read it.

By the way, also send one to Beauregard. It might help give him some perspective 

[MarquetteDano]

The Big East could go 110-10 in the non-con and it will get a few writers saying it is underrated.

Right or wrong, the only way we are going to get respect is doing well in the tournament.  The NIT may help marginally as well.

We need at least two Sweet Sixteen teams and an Elite Eight team, at a minimum.  Preferably, a final four team.  If we don't do that expect the same treatment.

Last year was a debacle.  Nova and Creighton did nothing.  We really need to cheer on the BE teams this year.

Edit: above I mean two teams make the S16 and one of those makes the E8

[mattyv1908]

The conference needs Nova to remain a national powerhouse as well as 2-4 teams being consistently in the top 25.

Georgetown, St Johns, Providence and Marquette being in that group would do the most for the visibility of the conference.  The best thing that could happen for the Big East is for Georgetown and St John's to have deep runs in the tournament this season and turn that momentum into a stretch of national success.

New York and DC is where the respect will have to come from.

[bilsu]

The strength of the conferences will be shown in the NCAA tournament. I will be surprised, if the Big East gets more than 4 wins in the tournament.

[wadesworld]

The strength of the conferences will be shown in the NCAA tournament. I will be surprised, if the Big East gets more than 4 wins in the tournament.

Nova might get that themselves.

[Galway Eagle]

The conference needs Nova to remain a national powerhouse as well as 2-4 teams being consistently in the top 25.

Georgetown, St Johns, Providence and Marquette being in that group would do the most for the visibility of the conference.  The best thing that could happen for the Big East is for Georgetown and St John's to have deep runs in the tournament this season and turn that momentum into a stretch of national success.

New York and DC is where the respect will have to come from.

Disagree with providence and semi St. John's.  I feel this day and age people have short memories and its best years and years since SJU was good for more than a year.  Us Nova and GTown are the most prominent recently in my opinion butler and x to.

[rocky_warrior]

The strength of the conferences will be shown in the NCAA tournament. I will be surprised, if the Big East gets more than 4 wins in the tournament.

I completely disagree.  The big east did very well in non-conference, and overall records look worse because of all the good teams in conference.  I expect a good NCAA tournament for the big east.

[TAMU, Knower of Ball]

I was checking some things for a PT article I'm working on and it reminded me of this conversation. This is how bad the AAC is.

There are 351 teams in Divsion 1 basketball.

That means that the 176th ranked team is the "median" team. All teams ranked higher are in the top half. All teams ranked below are in the bottom half. According to KenPom, that team this year was Robert Morris (16 seed autobid in NCAA tournament).

Among all the high major conferences not including the American, there were 5 teams in the bottom half (according to KenPom): Rutgers from the Big 10, Washington State from the PAC 12, Virginia Tech (ha) from the ACC, and Missouri and Mississippi State from the SEC (Notice, the Big East has zero teams on this list).

The American Athletic Conference had 5 teams in the bottom half by itself. Houston, East Carolina, Tulane, Central Florida, and South Florida were all ranked in the bottom half.

To add more insult to insult, all 5 of the AAC's teams were ranked below all 5 of the bottom half teams from all the other high major conferences combined.

179 Mississippi State
184 Virginia Tech
192 Washington State
214 Missouri
215 Rutgers
220 Houston
229 East Carolina
238 Tulane
287 Central Florida
295 South Florida

Mississippi State, Virginia Tech, Missouri, and Rutgers all have great recruiting classes coming in that should hopefully lift them off this list next year. The 5 AAC teams (and Washington State)? Not so much.

If we call the Atlantic 10, Missouri Valley, and West Coast Conference mid major, than the American definitely belongs on that list. God, I'm glad we got out of that cesspool.

[GoldenWarrior11]

The AAC, for a league that is marketing itself as equal to a P5 league, is such a poor conference, not just in terms of athletics, but in terms of institution, location and prestige.

They have some really god-awful football and basketball programs that really drag down the entirety of the conference.  In football, you have UConn, Tulane, Tulsa and SMU that won a combined SEVEN games last season.  Over half the league had either a .500 or sub-.500 record, and seven of the schools averaged fewer than 30k people per home game.  In basketball, you had Tulane, East Carolina, UCF, Houston and USF all lose 2/3 or more of their conference games.  Tulane had NUMEROUS games that had fewer than 1,000 people in attendance.

They have schools in Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Oklahoma.  There is no sense of region to the league, so there is no development of rivalries with member schools.  Throw in the fact there is a large mixture of public and private institutions and a service academy, there is no set of direction or institution with the schools.  It is, for a lack of a better description, a total mess.

Marquette and the other Catholic schools were unbelievably wise to get make a move when they did.  If they got stuck in this conference with some of these terrible basketball programs, who knows what our future who hold.