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Enigmatic Hoyas hope for the best
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Kevin Braswell will run the show again for the Hoyas.
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When the Carrier Dome is rocking with 33,000 fans, Syracuse has one of the greatest home court advantages in the country. But since the inception of the Big East in 1979-80, no other league school has a winning record on the road. The Orangemen, meanwhile, are 23 games over .500.
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"The ultimate revenge for me will be to see (Syracuse coach Jim) Boeheim still going to PTA meetings when he's 78."
-- Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun, joking about the 57-year-old Boeheim's three children under age 5.
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By Dave Hickman, Special to CNNSI.com
Craig Esherick is like most every coach in the country as he tries to shape his Georgetown basketball team.
"We've had days when I watch these guys and I think we're pretty good," he said. "And we've had days when I watch these guys and I think we're awful. I don't know, maybe we're somewhere in the middle."
Well, if Esherick's Hoyas are anything but very good this season, his counterparts in the Big East will be stunned.
Twelve of the 13 coaches in the league picked Georgetown to win at least the West division championship in a preseason poll. And nearly all of them agree that if there is going to be a breakout team in the conference, Georgetown is it.
"They're the one team, maybe the only team, in our league that I would project into the top 10," said Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim. "I don't see any of our other teams being in there until later in the season, if then."
Why? Well, start with point guard Kevin Braswell, whose development has come full circle in the last three years. Once regarded as too much of a scorer, Braswell became the consummate playmaker last season for the Hoyas but this winter will be asked to score more. Go figure.
Toss in 6-foot-8, 260-pound sophomore forward Mike Sweetney and a vast array of experienced players and newcomers to plug into the other holes, and the Hoyas are easily the deepest, most balanced team in the Big East.
"I'm not crying about the talent we have. And this group is picking things up quicker than last year," said Esherick, whose 25-8 team last season made it the NCAA Sweet 16. "But we've got to put in the same effort as last year and have the same team chemistry. ... I keep telling these guys -- and I know they're sick of hearing it -- none of this matters unless they put in the same kind of work."
Boston College, the worst-to-first darlings of last season in the league, won't slide much. But the Eagles will have to make do without player of the year Troy Bell for a while after the guard underwent knee surgery the last week of October.
But any slip at all could be enough to send B.C. reeling out of first place in the East division because of the talent on hand at Connecticut ( Taliek Brown and Caron Butler ) and Miami ( Darius Rice and John Salmons ). And Providence still has mini-mighty John Linehan to disrupt backcourts far and wide.
In the West, it appeared Syracuse had the talent to come close to Georgetown, but the Orangemen took a brutal hit in October with the loss of freshman point guard Billy Edelin.
Notre Dame ( Troy Murphy ) and Seton Hall ( Eddie Griffin, Samuel Dalembert ) both were weakened by early departures to the NBA.
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Mike Brey all but breathed a sigh of relief when he found out his fellow coaches had voted for a freshman point guard as the league's preseason rookie of the year.
He was relieved because it wasn't his own.
While West Virginia's Jonathan Hargett gets the majority of the attention when talk turns to newcomers, Notre Dame's Chris Thomas isn't too shabby, either.
"Hargett is a heck of a guard," said Brey, who will coach Thomas this season and would probably prefer to keep the pressure off of him. "If Chris can stay healthy, he's going to be out there enough to really display his stuff. He'll be right in the running."
Already Thomas has made an impact. In Notre Dame's first exhibition game Nov. 1, the 6-foot-1, 165-pounder from Indianapolis had 14 points and nine assists in 29 minutes during a 108-75 win over the touring SportsIsWar.com all-stars.
Thomas averaged 23.3 points and 5.7 assists last season and was named Indiana's Mr. Basketball.
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HOT: Miami
Despite a 16-13 record in 2000-01, the Hurricanes got two first-place votes in the coaches' preseason poll.
This despite having a point guard, Michael Simmons, who had nearly as many fouls (71) as assists (72).
NOT: Syracuse's backcourt
Not only was Edelin kicked out of school for at least a year when two female students said he assaulted them, shooting guard DeShaun Williams was convicted on a DWI charge and will apparently have to sit out at least the first five games. That leaves James Thues and Kueth Duany as the starters.
HOT: Villanova's Gary Buchanan
In two years with the Wildcats, the guard has missed five free throws (in 94 attempts) in league games.
NOT: Pitt
The Panthers, after losing eight of their first 12 Big East games last season, made it to the finals of the league tournament for the first time, then won an NIT game. Despite that, the league's coaches voted Pitt ahead of only Rutgers in the preseason poll.
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Syracuse's Boeheim coached the U.S. team at the World Championships for Young Men in Japan over the summer. The team included Boston College's Bell and forwards Sweetney of Georgetown and Butler of Connecticut.
And along the way, Boeheim introduced the concept of defense to both Sweetney and Butler, talents both will take back to the Big East this season.
"I'd like to send a little card of thanks to coach Boeheim,'' said Esherick. "Syracuse is our biggest rival and there he is helping us out. What a guy."
Oddly enough, Syracuse and Connecticut don't play during the regular season so the improvement in Butler won't come back and bite Boeheim. But Connecticut coach Calhoun still seems grateful.
"Last year," Calhoun said, "an office chair could have scored 10 points on Caron."
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 St. John's recruiting
In each of the last four years (three of them with Mike Jarvis at the helm), the Red Storm has had a player on the Big East's all-rookie team. Unfortunately, Ron Artest, Erick Barkley and Omar Cook all left early for the NBA, so only Anthony Glover remains.
WVU coach Gale Catlett
Hargett will likely become Catlett's first WVU recruit to make it into the NBA (he's in his 24th season). He gets a game ball not so much for recruiting Hargett, but for hiring assistant coach Chris Cheeks, who has known the Hargett family for years.
Georgetown's scheduler
Yes, the Hoyas still play a healthy dose of the Towson States. But with Georgia, Virginia and UCLA on tap before the New Year, Esherick isn't playing just patsies in November and December, as John Thompson was wont to do.
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At the beginning of last season, the best late-season showdown looked like Connecticut at Seton Hall, the most insignificant Boston College at Providence. What happens? UConn-Hall matches teams with a combined 12-18 league mark, while a week earlier B.C. and Providence play at a combined 21-7 with a division title at stake.
The point? By the time these games arrive, they could mean nothing.
Still, you've got to love the fact that Boston College plays Syracuse in front of 33,000 and a CBS audience on the last day of the season, March 3. If Syracuse can stay with Georgetown in the West division race to the last weekend, the Hoyas have a huge edge closing out at home with Rutgers.
West favorite Georgetown, by the way, meets East favorite Boston College early -- Jan. 12 at Conte Forum.
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Not that Virginia Tech's only problem during a 2-14 Big East season was its point guard, but with a freshman there much of the season that was a big problem. So Ricky Stokes went out and found the anti-freshman. Eric Branham, a 5-11 junior from Washington, D.C., is 22 years old, has spent a year at a military academy, one at a junior college in Kansas and two at another JC in Maryland. ... Louis Orr (Syracuse, '80) became the first former Big East player to be named a league head coach when he took over at Seton Hall. ... When the Big East expanded and adopted round-robin play within each of two divisions last year, it meant each school would skip playing three teams in the other division each year. This season, Syracuse doesn't play Connecticut. "I think there should be no year when Syracuse and Georgetown don't play twice," said UConn coach Jim Calhoun, who yearns for the days when the Big East was a nine-team league. "I miss playing Georgetown." |
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Dave Hickman covers the Big East for the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette. His "This Week in the Big East" column will appear weekly during the season.
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