BigEastCast Homepage Blog

Coaching carousel hit the Big East

It’s been a while since I filled this space. Since then, I’ve married and moved, and I’ve finally settled to the point where I can again attend to my Visions. I hope I didn’t leave you in a lurch and that you’re glad I’m back. There’s a lot to cover, and I’m not [...]

NCAA Tournament Preview

You’ll see that our NCAA Tournament preview is up on the site and went up on Tuesday. As with the Big East Tournament preview, we wanted to give you a little outline of the pace of the cast so you can flip around if you like. Intro and headlines: Big East champs, all-tournament team (1:00) [...]

Bracket Junkie: Shoulders shrugged

After months of evaluating teams and seeing them jostle for position, I’m left without much conviction behind my last few picks to make the NCAA Tournament. Thursday saw almost every team around the bubble lose, a symbol of a season in which the nation’s mediocre seemed especially so. In the end, I narrowed [...]

Pittsburgh’s desire trumps Georgetown

NEW YORK — In the last two Big East Tournament finals, Pittsburgh’s saw its dreams of hoisting a Big East championship trophy dashed first by Syracuse and then by Georgetown. It seemed academic that the Panthers, playing four games in four days with just a seven-man rotation, were destined to end [...]

MSG a Pitt of destruction

NEW YORK — Seeding doesn’t matter. Fatigue doesn’t matter. Getting outrebounded by 15 doesn’t matter. The only two things that seem to matter in the Big East Tournament is that Pittsburgh is playing and it’s at the Garden. This was surely the year that Pittsburgh was not going to get back to another [...]

Weary WVU can’t hang with Hoyas

NEW YORK — Sometimes you need help, and sometimes you need your legs. West Virginia had neither on Friday. For two days, Joe Alexander made Madison Square Garden his personal stage, delivering brilliant soliloquies and artistic interpretations of age-old basketball moves in eliminating Providence and Connecticut. But playing a third superb game [...]

MU takes advantage of matchup

NEW YORK — The hackneyed expression goes that styles make fights, and that’s also true of basketball games. Twenty-four hours after Seton Hall and Marquette spent 40 minutes in a clinch, Notre Dame gave the Golden Eagles space, and that allowed Jerel McNeal and Maurice Acker to connect on enough haymakers to land [...]

Plenty in reserve for Panthers, Cards

NEW YORK — On the last rebound of the game in which the contest’s result was still in doubt, two bench players determined the outcome. With 1:30 left in overtime of Pittsburgh’s 76-69 win over Louisville in the Big East Tournament on Thursday, the Cardinals trailed by four. Louisville’s Andre McGee attempted a [...]

Golden Eagles win battle with Pirates

NEW YORK — When the shots won’t fall, the best-coached teams can look more like a pack of streetballers than a trained division of athletes. When two teams not known for their aesthetic styles meet at the Big East Tournament and battle for a win for 40 minutes? Let’s just say Springfield [...]

Lengthy season wearing down Blair?

NEW YORK — Last October, at Big East preseason media day in Madison Square Garden, Pittsburgh’s players wanted to tell anyone who would listen that a Pittsburgh-metro prospect named DeJuan Blair was — all due respect to Syracuse’s Jonny Flynn and Donte’ Greene — as good as, or better, than any [...]