The Big East Looms Over The Sweet Sixteen

(Photo by Michael Heiman/Getty Images)

March Madness is upon us and to few people's surprise the Big East is dominating.  The 16-team behemoth of a conference sent seven of its members to the NCAA tournament—three of them No. 1 seeds—and has gone 11-2 in the first round with Pitt, Louisville, UConn, Villanova, and Syracuse making it to the Sweet Sixteen.  

By contrast, the ACC and Big Ten, both of which were also given seven slots in the tourney, haven't fared as well.

The ACC has two teams in the Sweet Sixteen with North Carolina and Duke advancing, but had four first-round losers in Clemson, Boston College, Wake Forest and Florida State.  Maryland lost in the second round.

The Big Ten also has two teams advancing with Purdue and Michigan State surviving to play another day, but first-round losers were Ohio State, Illinois, and Minnesota. Wisconsin and Michigan fell in the second round.

There wasn't much argument that the Big East was the best conference in the country going into March, but did the selection committee really think that the ACC and Big Ten were as deserving of seven invitations to the dance as the Big East?

Seven first-round losers between the two pretty much put that notion to rest.

Maybe it would have been better to give another slot to the Big 12, which has three teams, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma in the Sweet Sixteen and went 7-3 over the first two rounds.

And all of the six Pac-10 teams minus Cal won their first-round games—which is what you would expect of a major conference.  Arizona State, UCLA, USC and Washington succumbed in the second round leaving only Arizona to advance.

As bad as the Big Ten and ACC performances over the first two rounds have been, at least they had teams that were thought highly enough of to get in. The SEC only sent three teams, two of them, Mississippi State and Tennessee were shown the door in the first round, and LSU was sent packing in the second in the most disappointing showing of any major conference in the tournament.

The howls of outrage from the Mountain West have faded away to whimpers after their only two teams invited to the dance were both bounced out in the first round.

But still you have to wonder, is having a super conference like the Big East really good for college basketball?  Is it possible that the ACC and Big Ten were over-represented this year because no one wanted to admit those traditional powerhouse conferences were outclassed by the Big East this year?

Is it really necessary to have 16 teams in one conference?  You can't even schedule everyone to play the same teams twice, not if you want to have a tournament and a few non-conference games.

And wouldn't it be better for both Memphis and basketball in general if Louisville was still in Conference USA?  The same argument could be made for other teams in the Big East.

A conference like the Big East has the real potential to suck the oxygen out of the room for every other conference in the country.  The Big East's performance in this year's tournament is only going to accelerate the flow of money to the Big East to the detriment of everyone else.

That's not a good thing.

Break up the Big East.

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