Marquette Still Thriving in Lesser Big East by Michael Hunt of JSOnline

Here's an article about the new climate in the Big East and how Marquette fits in it. I think you'll enjoy it.
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By Michael Hunt | In My Opinion from the Journal-Sentinel
Jan. 31, 2012

The Big East, which might as well get it over with and call itself the Big Country at some point in the future, has had better seasons.


Syracuse is rocking the No. 2 spot, but it is not long for the conference. Neither are Pittsburgh and West Virginia, which are slumming at the moment with Louisville, Villanova, Notre Dame, Cincinnati, Connecticut and assorted other wayward giants that once gave the Big East serious college basketball credentials.

Put another way, the Huskies, who won the national championship last season, got as many AP top-25 votes this week as the Iona Gaels. That would be two.

Other than Syracuse, the poll currently includes only No. 14 Georgetown and No. 15 Marquette.

That is not the Golden Eagles' fault. The fact they have remained consistently tough in a time just before the Big East's credibility is stretched like its travel budgets to reach Idaho, California and Texas is a compliment to the league's most reliable team in recent years.

Just because conferences no longer honor geography either as a means of greed or (in the cast of the Big East) survival, doesn't mean Marquette has to compromise its level of dependability just to accommodate everybody else's problems.

Tuesday night, the Eagles moved within a game of their fourth consecutive 20-victory season with Buzz Williams. They've never met a floor from which they wouldn't accept a burn or a pick from which they would not take a bruise. They overcome the absence of the occasional big man, they persevere rough stretches. That is what they forever do.

But if there can be a problem with a team that won its seventh consecutive game with a 66-59 pin-fall of a painfully tedious Seton Hall, it would be that such consistency breeds a certain level of, um, uniformity at Marquette. You don't want to say if you've seen one Williams team you've seen them all, but it's pretty close to a complimentary form of reality. If that's the worst thing you can say about the Eagles, then scoot on down to Chicago and ask DePaul how causal it would be with 88 W's since 2008.

No one needs to be reminded that size remains a precious commodity at Marquette. That is as obvious as the front-row Bradley Center presence of Dwyane Wade and LeBron James on the night before they were in town to play the joint.

"I appreciate them coming out," Eagles forward Jae Crowder said. James might have tried to go all Bobby Valentine with lens-less glasses and a hat with the great, big Heat logo, but there is no disguising the fact that the Eagles are again playing over their heads in a physical sense.

How leading with guards projects in the NCAA Tournament, where Marquette hasn't made much progress since Wade was on scholarship, is unclear. It's just as hard to project how the Eagles might do in a radically different Big East because there is no guarantee they will even be in the league in five years, should it still exist.

The only thing that matters at the moment is Marquette has more than a sporting chance to finish second in the Big East. Even if that might be like finishing second in an ugly-dog contest in this particular season, it bears repeating that it is not the Eagles' problem that they have refused to lower their regular-season standards.

"You can't live in the past in this league," Vander Blue, one of the three guards in Marquette's perpetual three-guard set, said after laying a surprising 16 points and eight rebounds on the Pirates.

Blue was selling the Big East's strength, which is what he is supposed to do as a respectful university rep. But living in the past would definitely be a bad idea because that was when Connecticut, Pitt, et al, would eat when it wanted.

But right here, right now, just this moment, there is no better time for the red-hot Eagles to spread their wings.