The Big East Conference announced today that all members of the conference will be invited to play in the postseason Big East basketball tournament starting in 2009. This will take place in both men’s and women’s basketball.
Since the 2005-06 season, the Big East has only taken the top 12 from the 16 teams in the conference when they expanded the conference.
“Our presidents performed a very thorough review of the tournament format. And after extensive deliberation, it was decided that inviting all the teams would provide a special opportunity to every men’s and women’s basketball student-athlete,” said Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese.
With the expanding of the tournaments, each of them will start a day earlier. The top 4 teams will receive byes into the quarterfinals. The teams that are seeded 9 through 16 will play on the first day and then be reseeded to play the 5-8 seeds. Then the quarterfinals will begin. I guess we will wait to see how that works because I am already confused.
This is a big thing for the lower tier schools in the conference. This still allows them to play on the national stage since ESPN has coverage of the men’s tournament and ESPN2 covers most of the women’s. This will help these teams out with recruiting.
