As is traditional around this time of year, the Big East has rolled out opponents for each team. Before I get to the breakdown, I want to point out how odd I think it is that they chose NBA Draft day to put out this release. I completely understand that once the players graduate or otherwise leave the member schools, the stake of the Big East has in their success becomes largely minimized, if not completely eliminated.

But wouldn’t you want to keep the attention on the draft when you have a top-five player (perhaps top-three) in Wesley Johnson, another projected to go in the top 10 in Greg Monroe and two other first-rounder candidates in Dominique Jones and Stanley Robinson? Maybe only die-hards like me care about this sort of thing, and while it’s not worth making a huge deal out of, the timing is a little strange.

On to the schedule, the conference foes, split into home and away, are as follows (home-and-aways are bolded):

Home: Cincinnati, DePaul, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Providence, Rutgers, Seton Hall, Villanova, West Virginia
Away:  Connecticut, Georgetown, Louisville, Marquette, Pittsburgh, St. John’s, Seton Hall, USF, Villanova

The thing that sticks out most is that without knowing the schedule, which usually comes out in August, that’s one hell of a road slate, but a very manageable set of teams coming to the Loud House – Cincy, DePaul, Providence, Rutgers and Seton Hall all finished in the bottom half of the standings last season. There will be several opportunities to sing “The Hey Song” and load up on tacos, windshield wiper fluid or whatever it is they dole out when the Orange tops 100 points.

The home-and-away with Seton Hall is not like the others with Georgetown and Villanova, but however the rotation system is set, SU seems to always get a clunker (Providence last season, Rutgers the year prior, South Florida the year before that…).

Also, I find it noteworthy that the Orange has not played UConn twice in conference play since 2006-2007 (not including Big East Tournament games), considering the rivalry. For some persepective, SU and ‘Nova have shared home-and-aways in four of five seasons, if you count the upcoming campaign.

As I said before, I’ll analyze things further once the conference irons out the logistics and finalizes dates closer to summer’s end, but in the meantime, there’s a few things to chew on.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 1:30 pm by Brian G. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.