STEVE LAVIN, St. John’s:
On the new Big East’s NCAA Tournament potential: “It’s analgous to the Pac-10 from the strong years (in the 1990s and early 2000s). When you look at the quality of the coaching, 10 teams being the number, having a champion based on a home-and-home schedule, you have that balance. This is old school.”
“It sets up very nicely for the Big East on a regular basis to have seven or eight teams in the hunt for the NCAA Tournament. You can get five or six teams in consistently. There was a stretch (in the Pac-10) when a down year was four, a good year was six and a number of years there were five. Half the league was going to the NCAA Tournament, and not only did they get in, they were making runs. The Big East should be able to do the same thing with the quality of the coaching, the recruiting centers the schools are in, operating (our tournament) out of the Garden and the TV exposure.”
On the importance of the non-conference schedule, given the loss of RPI-building games against Syracuse, UConn and Louisville: “I think we’re going to learn as we go. When you look at the strength of schedule in the more recent RPI, you some times need Alan Greenspan to figure out the formula for success. I think this conference, the coaches and the league office have a strong sense of what it’s going to take, but we’re going to find out more as we go through these next couple of years, and that will help us moving forward in terms of how we schedule.”
“There needs to be a balance of enough high-level games out of conference, but we also have to be careful not to over-schedule because we’ll beat each other up in league play.”
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