MORGANTOWN — When your home address is the Big East in basketball, the only guarantees you have are that they are no guarantees.
You may be West Virginia University and considered among the elite in a conference of elites, but if you think that means anything on any given evening you can just forget it.
For example, the Mountaineers know that closing out the season with games against Georgetown on Big Monday and at Villanova on the final Saturday is a hardly what you’d want heading into the Big East Tournament, but they can’t overlook their Saturday date with a middle-of-the pack Cincinnati team that comes to the Coliseum, either.
See, there are no gimmes in the Big East.
Don’t believe it, ask Jamie Dixon of Pitt. You might remember him. He coached his team past West Virginia last week and suddenly found himself unexpectedly battling for a double bye in the conference, facing a Notre Dame team that was without its star, Luke Harangody, and that had been losing regularly without him.
Guess who won?
That’s life in the Big East.
“You’ve got good teams playing so you have to play good every night,” Dixon said. “It’s not easy to do.”
See, great teams don’t always beat good teams, and in the Big East, that pretty much is all you have.
Think there will be an unbeaten team in the conference going into the season? Forget it.
The conference may produce the national champion and two or three Final Four teams, but you don’t go through the year without being upset.
“You have to play good 18 straight nights,” said Dixon. “You can’t do that and, at the same time, the other team is trying to win as hard as you.”
And so it is as Cincinnati comes to town, a team that may have a couple of NBA players in Lance Stephenson and Deonta Vaughn, a team with as deceiving a 7-8 conference record as you can imagine, combined with a 16-11 regular-season mark.
The Bearcats are tough, mirrors in many ways of West Virginia in that they play with the same philosophy of beating you with intensity, defense and rebounding. Their coach, Mick Cronin, was a Bob Huggins assistant at Cincinnati and now has a history of knowing how to beat him.
The last two times they have played, the Bearcats have beaten WVU. True, West Virginia has scored 100 points against Cincinnati, but it took them both games to do it, having been held to embarrassingly low 39 points in Huggins first meeting with his former team on the Coliseum court.
“We’ve played pretty good defense, but they haven’t made any shots against us,” Cronin said. “We’re trying to make them make shots from the outside.”
And the Bearcats come in hungry, supposedly a bubble team.
“We’re a bubble team. We’ve got to find ways to get some wins,” said Cronin on Thursday’s Big East coaches conference call.
See, those of you who think WVU was dealt a tough hand closing with Villanova and Georgetown, think about Cincinnati, who also closes against those same two teams in addition to playing at West Virginia in a game that could eliminate them from NCAA consideration.
“We put ourselves in this position,” Cronin admits. “We had plenty of close losses.”
That is what makes them such a dangerous opponent.
“You are going to come out fighting when your back is against the wall,” Cronin said. “We try to use that to our advantage.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
