By only sending two teams to the Sweet 16, the mighty Big East has been one of the NCAA Tournament’s biggest storylines — for all the wrong reasons.

Despite earning eight bids, one more than a year ago, the league has been ravaged these past two weeks. Six teams lost during the first weekend. Not even top-seeded Syracuse — at one point the No. 1 team in the nation — could avoid the carnage, falling to Butler Thursday and ending a fabulous season prematurely.

The conference, often considered the best in America, had been humbled and embarrassed.

Now, West Virginia carries the torch as the league’s lone representative in the Final Four and has an opportunity to salvage the season for the rest of the conference. All it has to do is win two more games.

But the Mountaineers winning the national championship wouldn’t totally make up for the rest of the Big East’s struggles. Nobody will forget how Villanova, seemingly a Final Four contender, barely beat Robert Morris before falling to Saint Mary’s. Or how Georgetown, so impressive in the Big East tournament, couldn’t handle Ohio in the opening round.

A title wouldn’t necessarily make the Big East the best league in the nation this year or explain its sudden lack of depth. But it would give the Big East something no other conference can boast: the ultimate prize. The best team in the country. A national champion.

‘We want to be the last team standing, period,’ WVU head coach Bob Huggins said Thursday night when asked how it felt to be the last Big East team standing.

That’s the best attitude to take. There is no glory in outlasting the other seven Big East teams, especially this season. Sixty-four of 65 teams in this Tournament lose their last game of the season. West Virginia is two wins away from being the one that doesn’t.

Despite all the praise the conference has received and how well it has performed in the Tournament the past few years, its teams have not been winning championships. No Big East school has won it all since 2004, when Ben Gordon and Emeka Okafor brought Connecticut its second title.

Even last year, when the league earned three No. 1 seeds in the Tournament for the first time in history and put two in the Final Four, the Big East failed. Thanks to Connecticut and Villanova losses, the conference wasn’t represented in the final game.

West Virginia could very well change that. The Mountaineers rolled through the Big East tournament and have looked dominant during the NCAA’s. The best team has survived the longest, and the players know what’s at stake.

‘We can’t be happy just being there, the Final Four,’ forward Da’Sean Butler said after WVU beat Kentucky in the Elite Eight Saturday. ‘It doesn’t mean anything unless you win the whole thing. Everything is in vain unless you win the whole thing.’

The Big East coaches have tried to downplay the conference’s poor showing in the Tournament. They have preached parity in college basketball, all in support of their conference counterparts. They try to act unsurprised by the way things have played out.

Case in point …

‘The problem with college basketball is there’s not a big gap,’ Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said after SU beat Gonzaga in the second round. ‘If you don’t play well, whoever it is you’re playing can beat you. It’s as simple as that.’

Huggins himself got a bit defensive about his conference, as the other teams began to topple.

‘Whoever doesn’t think the Big East is a great league shouldn’t be writing sports,’ Huggins told reporters after his team beat Missouri in the second round. ‘They ought to do something else, cooking or something.’

Even the West Virginia players are now in the business of defending the Big East.

In the locker room Thursday night, after the Mountaineers took care of Washington in the Sweet 16, reporters began spreading the word that Syracuse had lost, leaving WVU as the last Big East team standing.

The players, like their coach, didn’t make much of it. Both WVU’s Butler and forward Kevin Jones said they were convinced the Big East is still the best league in the nation. Cam Thoroughman seemed outright disappointed.

‘We were rooting for Syracuse like we were rooting for the rest of the Big East,’ he said. ‘We were going to be rooting for Syracuse until we played them in the final game.’

But, even if they choose not to acknowledge it, the fact remains that the Big East’s performance has been perhaps the biggest surprise of the entire Tournament.

And that wasn’t lost on at least one player Thursday night.

‘Syracuse lost? Wow,’ forward Wellington Smith said. ‘I can’t believe that. I really can’t believe that.’

That leaves West Virginia with the weight of the largest, and perhaps the nation’s most powerful and influential, conference sitting firmly on its shoulders.

Jared Diamond is the sports columnist for The Daily Orange, where his column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected].
 

Published on March 30, 2010 at 12:00 pm