Rush The Court

* paraphrased

We were alerted to an insightful bit of reporting by TSN’s Bill Eichenberger, who recently interviewed Louisville star forward Terrence Williams.  The piece is fairly standard playerspeak until you get to the end, when the following dialogue occurred:

Q: Where do you stand on the debate about which conference–the Big East or ACC–is college basketball’s best?

A: The Big East. I don’t know how you could even ask that. That’s easy. That’s not even a question.

Q: Why is that?

A: Look how physical we are. The ACC, that’s not physical. Our last-place team in the Big East could win in the ACC. We’re the toughest conference.

Q: What’s the best team you’ve faced this season?

A: That’s easy, Connecticut. We lost to them.

Wow.  T-Will went atomic on the perceived physicality (read: finesse) of the ACC right there.  It might suit Williams to recall that the team whom knocked his Louisville Cardinals out of last year’s NCAA Tournament Elite 8 game was indeed an ACC team.  An ACC team that outrebounded his Big East team 33-27 in that game – does rebounding correlate to toughness?

Ok, that was last year – he’s talking about this year… got it.  Still, does he really think Depaul or even Notre Dame or Georgetown could consistently win in the ACC?  Notre Dame got absolutely crucified against a team known for toughness in UCLA last weekend.  How about Villanova, Marquette or Syracuse – are those teams any tougher than Wake, Clemson or Virginia Tech? 

Looking at this year’s H2H, the ACC leads 9-6, but five of those ACC wins were against bottom-dwellers St. John’s, Rutgers and S. Florida, and the Big East has likewise loaded up on some marginal squads of the ACC.   There’s no true apples-to-apples comparison, so we’ll just all have to wait until Louisville and the rest of the Big East gets to show its toughness in March against the best of the best.  It says here that the leagues are a leeeeeetle more equal than T-Will thinks, and he may find out this lesson the hard way should he face one of the better ACC squads.

• 11/18/08 – Saint John’s 70 Boston College 82  (ACC)
• 11/19/08 – South Florida 75 Virginia 77  (ACC)
• 11/23/08 – Seton Hall 77 Virginia Tech 73  (BE)
• 11/23/08 – Connecticut 76 Miami (Fla.) 63  (BE)
• 11/26/08 – North Carolina 102 Notre Dame 87  (ACC)
• 11/28/08 – Virginia 70 Syracuse 73  (BE)
• 11/28/08 – Florida State 58 Cincinnati 47  (ACC)
• 11/30/08 – Georgetown 75 Maryland 48  (BE)
• 12/20/08 – Providence 76 Boston College 81  (ACC)
• 12/21/08 – Virginia Tech 81 Saint John’s 67  (ACC)
• 12/21/08 – Pittsburgh 56 Florida State 48  (BE)
• 12/22/08 – Marquette 68 North Carolina State 65  (BE)
• 12/27/08 – Miami (Fla.) 70 Saint John’s 56  (ACC)
• 12/28/08 – Rutgers 75 North Carolina 97  (ACC)
• 01/17/09 – Georgetown 67 Duke 76  (ACC)
• 02/19/09 – Duke at Saint John’s

Postscript: in a related vein but an unrelated interview, Bob Huggins also took a few minutes to toe the party line touting the Big East as the greatest thing since they cut a bottom out of the peach basket.  The Big East’s communications department must have hired Dana Perino this January.