Summer Session: Big East's Biggest Makeover on Sidelines

Stop us if you've heard this before: the Big East has been decimated by player departures. It can't possibly be as strong as it was last year.

The league's supporters would surely laugh at that projection, because it's a carbon copy of the national consensus about the Big East going into the 2009-10 season. With another crop of elite players steering several programs into regular residence in the top 10, and with no fewer than eight teams reaching the NCAA tournament, that prediction was largely debunked. The reason it wasn't completely blown apart was the mass of early eliminations -- don't let the door hit ya, Georgetown and Villanova -- yet it did get one school, West Virginia, into the Final Four.

Still, another typical talent defection ensued in the offseason, not just in uniform but on the benches. The good news: a handful of teams recruited so well and have enough players on the verge of making major contributions, the Big East should uphold its rep well. The bad news: one coach who stayed, in Louisville, had better be working on thickening his skin for the league's road trips after his summer extortion trial dragged his and his school's name through the mud.

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Comings and Goings

In the endless debates over conference supremacy, the Big East can claim four NBA first-round picks, two (Syracuse's Wesley Johnson, Georgetown's Greg Monroe) in the lottery, and 11 overall, best of any league. Say farewell to West Virginia's Da'Sean Butler and Devin Ebanks, Villanova's Scottie Reynolds, the Orange's Andy Rautins and Arinze Onuaku, Notre Dame's Luke Harangody, Connecticut's Jerome Dyson and Stanley Robinson, South Florida's Dominique Jones and Marquette's Lazar Hayward.

On the other end of the scale, Rutgers and Providence were gutted. The embattled Scarlet Knights saw mass transfers in the final, ugly days of the Fred Hill regime, led by top scorer Mike Rosario. Keno Davis, meanwhile, spent much of the offseason kicking players off the Friars team for various reasons, including leading scorer and rebounder Jamine Peterson.

More surprising and potentially impactful than all the player movement, however, is the influx of new coaches, representing a quarter of the Big East. Steve Lavin at St. John's. Oliver Purnell at DePaul. Kevin Willard at Seton Hall. Mike Rice at Rutgers. Meanwhile, the basketball world was hardly thunderstruck when Jim Calhoun signed his extension at Connecticut, but it did take awhile to get done, and his health and the ongoing NCAA investigation meant that his return was no sure thing.

A strong group of newcomers will help several of the perennial powers stay afloat. Seven-foot Fabricio Melo (who has, of all things, World Cup bloodlines from Brazil's national team) joins Syracuse. Power forward Jayvaughn Pinkston beefs up Villanova where it needs it most. Georgetown has a nice inside-outside recruit combo in forward Nate Lubick and guard Markel Starks. Connecticut hopes to make up for some recruiting misses in recent seasons with two-guard Jeremy Lamb and small forward Roscoe Smith. Middle- to lower-end programs hope to get boosts from Eric Atkins and Jerian Grant (son of ex-NBA twin Harvey) at Notre Dame, D.C.-area point guard Brandon Young at DePaul, and swingman Fuquan Edwin, one of Bobby Gonzalez's last recruits before his firing, at Seton Hall.

Upcoming Storylines

One could observe the routine, mundane plots of successful programs trying to maintain their excellence, or bouncing back from disappointing finishes. File Syracuse and West Virginia in the former category, as Jim Boeheim and Bob Huggins look to reload (and Huggins heals from a freak, still-vague Vegas hotel accident in which he broke several ribs). Put Villanova and Georgetown, after the aforementioned early NCAA exits, in the latter. Pittsburgh, which survived critical losses from its Final Four team and is primed to make another leap this year with a strong recruiting class, lands somewhere in between.

But few programs will attract more eyeballs than Louisville and Connecticut. The cloud Rick Pitino generated over Louisville might have no effect on his team's play; it didn't last year after news of his entanglements with Karen Sypher surfaced, or after two players got into a bar fight on the eve of fall practice. The Cardinals wriggled their way into the NCAAs and could thus deny all distractions -- but after this summer's trial, which ended in Pitino's favor only if you ignore the humiliating details it unmasked, the same questions will follow the program again this season. It didn't help that sophomore forward Samardo Samuels surprisingly exited for the NBA.

Up in Storrs, everybody is waiting for the other shoe to drop, and to see where the NCAA might put it. Unfortunately, they also will be watching Calhoun and hoping he is done with his increasingly-frequent health scares. Upon his signing of an extension which contained clauses concerning the team's academic performance, Calhoun insisted that last season's inconsistent play and NIT visit was a complete anomaly. Besides all the attention on Calhoun and the investigation, the jury will be out all season on the last few recruiting classes, and on could-be-great point guard Kemba Walker.

Notre Dame also enters the season with more distractions than it would like, after its top returning player, Tim Abromaitis, and key recruit Eric Atkins were swept up in a police underage-drinking crackdown in July. Atkins is part of a solid Irish recruiting class that will have to step up to keep the team afloat without Harangody.

At one program, Villanova, one of the more bizarre possible additions-by-subtraction in recent memory will be on display: Scottie Reynolds, one of the most accomplished players in program history and the foundation of the program for four years, was allegedly tied up in an unsavory feud with backcourt mate Corey Fisher that has been blamed in some quarters for the Wildcats' late-season fade. Reynolds is gone, Fisher is back.

Pre-Fall Power Rankings

1. Villanova - Should've been at least an Elite Eight team last year.
2. West Virginia - A handful of players have the ability to be this year's Da'Sean Butler.
3. Syracuse - Talented and deeper than last year -- but no one can replace Johnson.
4. Georgetown - Dynamic backcourt, needs youngsters to fill gap Monroe left.
5. Connecticut - Have to put puzzling '09-10 behind them.
6. Pittsburgh - Jamie Dixon worked wonders with last year's team; most of it returns.
7. Louisville - Doesn't even get a calm before the storm.
8. Marquette - Always in the mix.
9. St. John's - Got better late last season, setting a nice table for Lavin.
10. Seton Hall - Talented enough, might benefit from sanity on the sidelines.
11. Rutgers - At some point, they have to go up.
12. Notre Dame - Difference between Harangody short-term and long-term.
13. Cincinnati - Still searching for consistency.
14. DePaul - A program that should be better, a coach that should make it better.
15. South Florida - Stepped up last season, but Jones leaving hurts.
16. Providence - Next candidate to go 0-for-the-conference-season.

Watch List

Not necessarily the preseason All Big East team, but five players who bear watching in 2010-11.

G - Corey Fisher, Villanova. Averaged 13.3 points last season, scored 105 points (reportedly) in a summer-league game in the Bronx earlier this month.
G - Kemba Walker, Connecticut. Huskies fans are waiting for the flashes to stop and for the junior to put it all together.
F - Kevin Jones, West Virginia. The one positive from losing Butler and Ebanks: the versatile junior gets room to prosper.
F - Kris Joseph, Syracuse. Sixth man of the year takes on a bigger role now.
F - Herb Pope, Seton Hall. Bad offseason for league's top rebounder: ejected from NIT opener (a loss), saw the coach who rolled the dice on him get fired, entered and withdrew from NBA Draft, suffered serious, still-undisclosed medical emergency.