New Conference = Ouch

Now that my beloved Marquette Warri...uh, Golden Eagles have been knocked out of the C-USA tourney by the Texas Christian Horned Toads, and their season is essentially over (an NIT bid may be forthcoming, but I'm not holding my breath), let's start looking towards next year.

Next year, Marquette will be changing conferences. This is not necessarily a bad thing for a team of Marquette's caliber, if they were moving to, say, the Patriot League or the Mid-Continent Conference. But they have voluntarily chosen to commit basketball hara-kiri and move to the Big East, one of the, if not the, toughest basketball leagues in the NCAA. There, they will join teams such as Syracuse, Pitt, UConn, Boston College, Georgetown, Villanova, Seton Hall, St. Johns, Providence, and dreaded Catholic rival Notre Dame. If this means nothing to non-NCAA fans, let me lay it out for you: There are currently five ranked teams in this conference, more than any other; teams in this conference have won the NCAA Championship three out of the last six years, including the last two; all but two of the teams listed above have been to the Final Four at least once in the past 20 years, and four of them have won the whole thing. Pretty scary shit. And, as if this wasn't bad enough, Marquette has decided to bring two of the best teams in the nation along with them from Conference USA: Cincinnati and Louisville. (DePaul and S. Florida are also going, but they're worse than Marquette.) So, what you have is a decent team in a mediocre conference becoming a shitty team in the best conference. It's slightly better than moving to the ACC, but it's still pretty bad.

Not to shit on what the Men's team is going to face, but I feel sorriest for the Women's team. Being in the Big East, they'll have plenty of conference games against the UConn Lady Huskies, the most destructive force in Women's basketball. (They've gone 162-15 in the past five years, during which they've won the last three championships.) But don't get me wrong; the Men are fucked, too. It's going to be a hard bunch of years for Marquette basketball. It's too bad we don't have a football team; we might actually win a game in that Big East.