Filed under: Big East, Coaches, NCAA TournamentNEW YORK -- Jay Wright likened the power, depth and tradition of Big East basketball to that of the SEC in football.
"In the Southeastern Conference, in the south part of our country, football is king. It's part of the culture, so its always gonna be a force down there,'' the Villanova head coach said Wednesday at the Big East's media day at Madison Square Garden. "In the northeast part of the country, in areas where it's cold in the winter, basketball is part of the culture. ... There's no basketball season -- it's all year round. When they stop playing basketball in high school, they're in an AAU tournament the next day.''
Wright was using the comparison to illustrate the strength of the league born out of basketball, rather than football in every other major conference -- and to explain why the Big East is always in the conversation about which conference is best.
The one flaw: while it has teams sprinkled throughout the rankings every week and throughout the NCAA tournament every March, since its 2005 expansion to a then-unprecedented 16 teams, no Big East has won a national championship. Four programs have gone to the Final Four in those five seasons, but the most recent national champ, Connecticut in 2004, did it before expansion. That fact surprised several coaches who were told it Monday.
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