Posers, frauds, and surprises!
Big East Conference
Men’s Basketball 9/28/2026 12:30:00 PM
2026 BIG EAST Basketball Media Day Set for Thursday
NEW YORK — On Thursday, Oct. 1, the BIG EAST Conference will host its annual Basketball Media Day at the Marriott Marquis in the heart of Times Square in New York City.One of the premier preseason events in all of college basketball, BIG EAST Media Day features the league’s 22 head coaches and select student-athletes from across the conference. Comprehensive coverage throughout the event will include live interviews, press conferences, and exclusive content.
BIG EAST Media Day begins at 9 a.m. ET, beginning with welcome remarks from Fr. Brian Shanley, O.P., President of St. John’s University and Chair of the conference’s Board of Directors, followed by Commissioner Timothy J. Brosnan.
The BIG EAST will be the first power basketball conference to hold its 2026-27 media day. She starts ahead of a robust preseason exhibition schedule for its 11 member institutions. Exhibition tilts are set to begin the first weekend of October. In another 2026-27 first for the BIG EAST, Villanova will usher in the start of the regular season. The Wildcats’ men’s and women’s basketball programs play on an international stage as part of the Eternal City Tip-Off, in Rome, Italy on Sunday, November 1, 2026.
The full days’ events will be covered by the Peacock Channel.
Here we go!
Well, lo and behold…no surprises here folks. Nope! Well, other than the unusual confidence shown in #4 Marquette and #5 Providence. Every team in the league has delved deeply into the transfer portal for reinforcement players. Most have at least 5 transfers coming in. Even Marquette reached into the portal for help, after shunning such actions in favor of development for years. In these parts…the opinion is that no given team has an overt advantage. This is due to the high number of new personnel, coaching turnover, the time needed for bulk insertions of talent to mesh, mold, and gel into a team.
It is also a given that the pre-season coaches and media polls are guesses, favor the media darlings, and are more often incorrect than not. The BEast coaches preseason poll is horrendous and they overwhelmingly get it wrong on an annual basis. Now in fairness, the turnover in Big East coaches has picked up in recent seasons – so there’s that. But be that as it may , lemmings are lemmings…and plagues of them ‘blindly’ follow the leader(ship). A couple of media pundits have noted the oddness of Creighton being picked 7th in the standings. Specifically as the Jays have brought in a strong group of proven, seasoned, & mature players to offset the losses of a marginal group of exiting transfers. Saw a couple of posts (Norlander…Field of 68) that thought Creighton was lower, at 7th, than the incoming talent would suggest.
https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/big-east-conference-spending-new-commissioner
Huss: …on HS Recruits…
“I’m probably a little bit of an outlier in my views on high school basketball,” Huss said. “Maybe it’s skewed by the fact that I’m a long-time high school basketball and AAU basketball coach. I believe that the recipe for success for the last three decades has always been continuity. It’s been getting young players, attracting young players, developing young players, retaining young players. Whether that’s guys that have multiple years out of the transfer portal or that’s guys from high school basketball, I don’t necessarily care, but we’ve put a huge emphasis and we’re spending a ton of time on our class.
…on program continuity and skill…
“We’ve got a couple commitments in this [2027] class and we’re continuing to recruit more. We’re going to continue to lean into the high school piece and then honor the process of trying to retain those players as they develop in our program.”
“The idea is, obviously, always to be as skilled as you can,” Huss said. “When you think of Creighton basketball, it says ‘Let it Fly’ on our floor and in our practice facility for a reason. We’re all about shooting, skill, guys that can make shots from 22 feet away. When they can do that and they happen to be 6-8, 6-9, 6-10, 6-11, it makes it more interesting.
“It’s not all that dissimilar to what’s happening in professional basketball now. We’re trying to get longer, trying to get more positional size, and at the same time, we want to not sacrifice skill. I don’t necessarily think we set out to get all that much bigger, we were just able to do so.”
Jim Harvey, a.k.a. @gtmoblue
