2024-25 Conference Previews: Big East
fun, scary
Hello! As laid out in the season preview for this newsletter, we’re changing up preview season a little. Previews will be released in alphabetical order, but somewhat differently than usual: one P5 a day, one two-bid(ish) conference a day, and one grab bag of one-bid leagues a day. One of each will be free for all to read. This one is a paid piece, and there’s a link to sign up below.
You can find all of these in the 2024-25 previews section of this website. On with the show.
Tier 1
UConn
Creighton
Tier 2
Marquette
Xavier
St. John’s
Tier 3
Providence
Villanova
Seton Hall
Butler
Georgetown
DePaul
…oh my God. They have the same number of teams as they did last year and the year before that and the year before that. THEY HAVE ELEVEN TEAMS. They did not bend the knee to conference expansion. They have the same number of teams. Oh my GOD
Do you know how much I love this? Do you know how nice it is to not have to update a spreadsheet? To have an appropriate, normal number of teams in a conference? I weep for the kids of the future, who never grew up on an 11-team Big Ten, a 12-team SEC, or - you won’t believe this one - a 12-team Big 12.
The Big East was once the worst example of conference expansion. At one point they had 16 teams, which felt absurd but I suppose we all got used to it. Prior to the conference functionally splitting into two between Catholic(-adjacent) schools and public ones that went to the American, it was bloated, teams never played each other all that often, and for some reason UConn and St. John’s always had to play South Florida. It was stupid.
In 2014, post-split, they had 10 teams. In 2020, they added back UConn, who had finally realized the move to the AAC was a disaster for them specifically. They have an appropriate number of teams, everyone in it makes logical and geographic sense for the most part, and every program feels like an appropriate fabric of the Big East. It’s not a coincidence whatsoever that this is the one conference explicitly focused on basketball, therefore there is no serious motivation to add teams for TV money that everyone hates. You will not get the Cable Subscribers back in this league.
That’s why this is probably my favorite conference, at least among the P5s. Everyone plays everyone twice, home and away. Minus DePaul, who has the excuse of 20 years of incompetence, every home crowd is salty and tuned up appropriately. (Georgetown is excluded at this time, but the capability for saltiness is there.) The drop to 10-11 teams has done nothing bad for this conference, and last year, they were KenPom’s second-best conference in basketball behind the Big 12.
This is college sports done right. The athletes in other sports do not have to travel two or three time zones to briefly spar in a cross country meet or volleyball. For the most part, everything generally is sensibly done. It’s still a little weird that Creighton is here, but they have assimilated very well and considering numerous other Midwestern states are represented here I don’t think it’s a crime. I’ll take Creighton in the Big East over USC in the Big Ten every single day I’m breathing.
Anyway, there is basketball to be played. I debated this for a while but there is a two-team Tier 1. One has a far deeper track record than the other, but one has a far more proven roster than the other. One probably has the single best college basketball coach currently going but objectively has the roster I’m more concerned about.
But, well, I can’t help but slot UConn #1 overall in the conference again. You try doing anything different. At this point there is nothing really left for Dan Hurley to prove. He has the first back-to-back national titles since Billy Donovan and has put together back-to-back dominant runs to the national title in March. In terms of pure roster talent, using Torvik’s numbers, this is the most talented roster in college basketball.
Donovan’s post-title run, and the post-title runs of the other school that went back-to-back in modern history, are perhaps educational. Both were done in very different non-NIL, non-portal times, but after loading up for bear, it took Donovan’s Florida a full four seasons to get back to contender status and seven to make another Final Four. For Coach K and Duke after back-to-back titles in the early 1990s, the next year resulted in a 3-seed and a Round of 32 loss. Both would make at least one Final Four in the next seven seasons, but the inevitable feeling both programs had wasn’t permanent.
Hurley may be different, of course. It’s plausible he’s the new king emperor of college basketball, and everything may continue to bend to his will. But I do find it pretty interesting, the corollary to Donovan’s Florida: the first title run came from a 3-seed with outstanding metrics but a January/February lull that blew up their resume. The second title run was dominant almost the entire way and resulted in a title game victory over the most prolific post player in college basketball. But: it didn’t last forever.
This roster is better than that 2007-08 Florida one was, but it’s going to require some previous role players to step up into much bigger roles. I am most confident in Alex Karaban making that leap up. Karaban has been a perfect role player through two years of college play: a career 127 ORtg on 16% USG, an excellent defender, and a guy who’s shot 62% on twos/39% on threes. Now, he must take the next step in being the anticipated leading scorer on a team needing one.
Of the players I do feel concern about, Karaban’s not one. Across his career games with a 22% USG or higher, Karaban’s averaged a hilarious 151 ORtg on an 84% eFG%. Now, those numbers look as insane as they do because it’s a total of four games, and half were against crap competition. But! I can point to UConn’s December 5 win last year against UNC where Karaban dropped 18 & 9 on 23% USG as a potential data point for the future. He’s also just very smart and acknowledging of his role; his +8.5 BPM last year was top-40 in the sport.
There’s a few other leaps in waiting. Aside from Karaban I’m most confident in Hassan Diarra jumping into a star-like guy. Diarra is quite representative for me in what I’d call the Hurley Leap: guys who take significant analytical and quality-of-play jumps once moving from another school to Hurley’s system.
This is a 6-for-7 hit rate, and even with Naheim Alleyne, he became far better defensively in his one year with Hurley. Diarra was a patently awful offensive player in three years at Texas A&M. In one with Hurley, he posted a 120 ORtg on 17% USG, shot 57% 2PT/36% 3PT, and sustained his terrific defense. Now, he may have maxed out his capabilities, but a slight move towards more production is potentially lurking in there.
Other leap candidates, like returners Solo Ball, Jaylin Stewart, and Samson Johnson, are still here, too. Of the three Johnson has the best shot at success for me because he had solid-if-unspectacular numbers backing up Clingan last year, and if Hurley knows anything it’s how to make a center dominant. Ball and Stewart have yet to flash much of anything offensively, though, so the jury’s out there.
In all, you can see how this is a pretty wobbly path to the offensive excellence we’ve come to expect. The two best players by BPM are two role guys who’ve never had to take lead roles before. The two guys who have had lead-ish roles before, the transfers, have struggled heavily at previous schools with positive impact. The leader here is Aidan Mahaney, who comes over from St. Mary’s and was a sort of failed breakout candidate of 2023-24.
Mahaney is a good player who had a fantastic freshman conference campaign in the WCC where he shot 48% 2PT/41% 3PT and posted a 113 ORtg on 24% USG. That doesn’t usually happen for any freshman, though Mahaney was an unusually good recruit by SMC standards. Last year, SMC began the season attempting to slot Mahaney in as the lead guard. It didn’t work. SMC’s offense took off once Mahaney was moved to a more off-ball role, and in WCC play he shot 40% from three and posted a 121 ORtg on 22% USG. There are numbers here that suggest a plausible future star, and the Hurley Leap is absolutely in mind as I write.
But: I am very concerned that he might be Just A Shooter. Mahaney’s 2PT% of 43% in his career is alarmingly low, and he doesn’t have the size nor finishing skill to better that 2PT% by attacking the rim. Per Matthew Winick: “Last year - he was below average in: guarded jumpers, dribble jumpers, runners, rim attempts, short, and medium jumpers. He hit his threes that were uncontested, essentially.” That’s…scary. But if anyone can make this work, it’s Hurley, and that projected BPM/PRPG! bump Hurley has places Mahaney as roughly a Grant Nelson-level contributor. You can absolutely live with that.
I am less convinced that Hurley, the forever fixer, can fix Tarris Reed from Michigan. I was baffled that he was a UConn take when it happened. Across two years of Certifiably Juwan Howard Basketball, Reed has a career PRPG! of +1.0, a BPM of -0.3, and a 94 ORtg on 21% USG. His plus skill, as much as it exists, is rebounding…which probably should be one’s plus skill at 6’10”. Even applying the Hurley Leap average to Reed’s career, all it does is produce a player roughly as good as Nick Pringle was at Alabama: a fine bench piece that will get played off the floor in several different situations. We’ll see here; if Reed becomes even a Samson Johnson-level contrib then I will simply have to tip the cap.
Honestly, outside of Karaban and Mahaney, I worry immensely about this roster’s ability to score. Diarra may make that leap into a plus scorer as well, but he already made a huge leap from TAMU to UConn and what it resulted in is a good role player. As such, they really, really need 5-star Liam McNeeley to hit. McNeeley is a fantastic shooter from anywhere and hit 46% last year at Montverde, along with flashing decent finishing skills. I like McNeeley; I worry about putting too much on him too soon. Still, it’s Hurley, and if Hurley has taught us anything a certain level of blind trust is involved here.
Will it be okay if they’re just 1992-93 Duke, a 3-seed that was consistently a low-end top-10 team for most of the season but ultimately couldn’t overcome the loss of multiple starters? That’s largely what projection systems seem to expect; the average basketball consumer is expecting another 1 seed. As usual with UConn, I figure we’ll know what we’ve got here by Christmas.
If not the Huskies I really like this Creighton team, which has established a pretty high yearly floor under Greg McDermott. It really wasn’t that long ago where many openly wondered if McDermott was a product of his fantastic son, Doug, who led the peak Creighton teams of the early 2010s. Recall that Doug was on Creighton’s roster from 2011-12 through 2013-14, and up through the 2018-19 season, this was a reasonably fair assumption for many to make. Look at this high-level resume:
The clear three best seasons are the one with Greg’s son on the roster. Now, let’s include the five following seasons in that screenshot.
What happened? How did Creighton take a final, firm leap from the also-rans of college basketball into a program that’s been one of the sport’s 15 best for most of the last half-decade? The surprising answer if you watched those peak Creighton teams: a remade defense that’s finished top-25 three straight seasons, centered around a unique defensive approach that forces more midrange jumpers than almost anyone in the entire sport.
BEHIND THE WALL ($): The rest of the Big East, which has the exact same number of teams it usually does, can you believe it!!!