Big East is clearly the beast

BOSTON — "Our league is better than your league" has been a parlor game played out for decades in bars and on talk radio.

But seriously, have you checked out the Big East?

This year, there is no debate: Their league is better than yours.

In fact, there may have never, in the history of assemblages, been a league quite like it.

The Big East is the NFL's Black and Blue division combined with the American League East combined with the Southeastern Conference in college football.

Understand that this kind of thing might happen as often as Halley's Comet -- once every 76 years. It takes the perfect combination of know-how, coaches, want-to and 80% of your league's star players returning.

The Big East thinks it's the best league a lot of years, so you have to be careful.

The Pacific 10, remember, had 12 basketball national titles in its hip pocket before the Big East was formed.

"We tend to over-exaggerate and inflate some things that never really seem to come to fruition," Pittsburgh Coach Jamie Dixon, who grew up in Los Angeles, said Friday.

The conference, founded in 1979, was "so tough" it once instituted a six-foul rule. It was the league that, in 1985, put three schools in the Final Four.

Last spring, though, Dixon made the kind of prediction that can later be used against you in the court of public opinion.

Dixon claimed the Big East had potential to be "the best conference in the history of basketball."

Great: more Big East bloviating. We'll see about that.

And so they played the season . . . and the Big East had, at one point in January, nine of the top 25 ranked teams in the Associated Press poll. Pittsburgh and Louisville rose to No. 1 for the first time in their schools' history.

The Big East may not have the best individual team ever, but, from one through nine, the Yankees never fielded a better lineup.

Notre Dame and Georgetown were ranked No. 9 and No. 22 in the preseason AP poll and ended up getting chewed up like dog toys. The schools finished a combined 15-21 in conference play.

"There's a philosophy that we beat each other up," West Virginia Coach Bob Huggins said before this year's tournament started, "and there's the philosophy that, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

West Virginia didn't make it out of this year's first round, losing to Dayton, but Huggins' survival-of-the-fittest theory seems to be playing out.