Hoops Season: Can you feel it…callin’ in the air at night, oh lord. – Phil Collins
Hoops practices have begun…Exhibition tilts begin this week. We’re in the midst of conference media days events. Yep… basketball season has arrived. Here’s a snapshot of current events.
Protect College Sports Act bill.
Court rulings affecting fifth year and foreign players
More preview predictions
Upcoming exhibition games
links to informative articles below….
Protect College Sports Act
Just passed in the US Senate. Goes to the House of Representatives (out til 9 November 2026). Not likely to pass in the House. One of the main provisions is tougher restrictions on athletes payments. Many schools currently exceed the $21.5 million cap. 30+ P4 (football) schools exceed $30 million annually, with 10 schools exceeding $40 Million. Link at bottom of page
Court Rulings on 5th year/int’l players.
State cases in New York (Melvin Council Jr.), Florida (Aberdeen), Colorado, others – as well as a federal lawsuit in West Virginia (Brenen Lorient and Javan Buchanan) — yet, for the most part, the NCAA has been granted stays as it appeals each (cases in Ohio and Tennessee are two such examples). This is leading to players moving their lawsuits to other jurisdictions. Link at bottom of page
Other Big East Previews
Big East Preseason Poll is out. A little baffled by the lack of Creighton buzz this offseason. Roster has 12 legit high-major rotation pieces, and the starting five is a good mix of two-way veterans.
Will Connecticut re-claim the title? How real of a threat are Villanova and Marquette to the ‘traditional top 2’? The Big East will be a lot of fun this year, here’s my in-depth piece: https://t.co/sWGTlKXv96pic.twitter.com/2LmhXkgIcz
My Big East predictions with a caveat. Georgetown's prediction is incomplete and once the roster is finished, there's a chance that I would put the Hoyas as high as fifth or sixth. #BEMediaDay#HoyaSaxapic.twitter.com/Qo0C2RDaQQ
The Big East can't keep latching its reputation to the coaching credentials of Hurley & Pitino.
With a new commish and a collective spending budget of $135 million+ across 11 rosters, a huge season awaits for the only basketball-first power conference.https://t.co/vaXJgSJ4U9
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.
— Eye On College Basketball Podcast (@EyeOnCBBPodcast) October 2, 2026
Coach HussEnis – McAndrew – Green
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.”
Big East coaches tabbed Creighton men's basketball to finish seventh in the league and voted two Bluejays third-team all-conference heading into year one under Alan Huss.@JacobPadilla_ has more on that plus other notes from Big East Media Day here:https://t.co/dbY4Zlh6v6
WBR's @WBR_Tom unpacks Big East Media Day: on Creighton's seventh-place prediction, Alan Huss' first time in front of the league's media, the importance of high school recruiting in the transfer portal era, NIL budgets, and more.https://t.co/bIuJgq57wU
NOTE: These rankings are metrics-based, NOT subjective, using a formula factoring in opponent quality, elite matchups, game locations, preseason data and more 📊 pic.twitter.com/mdtZE6O7ax
