Schedule Release

The Big East Conference released the 2021-22 Men’s Basketball Conference schedule. Together with the already released individual team non-conference schedules, we now have full schedules for all 11 Big East teams, signalling the fast approaching 2021-22 season.

You can find the official release here, nice team-by-team schedule graphics here, here and here, and an always enjoyable John Fanta segment on the schedule release here. With all that, I still decided the schedule warranted one more format release, the grid you see above. Bold dates are Saturday or Sunday games and the date on the top of each cell is when the team on the left plays the team on top at home. For example, Creighton plays Villanova at home on December 17th, the Big East opener, and then travels to Villanova on January 5th.

It feels foolish to try to predict the best, most must watch games of the year while we’re still in September (especially with the insane roster turnover of college basketball and a new yearly class of freshmen who we know little about, even in the recruitment obsessed internet age), but I’ll give it a try anyway with some safe picks.

Games to Watch

1. Providence at UConn – 12/18/2022
2. Creighton at DePaul – 12/20/2022
3. Five Games on New Year’s Day – 1/1/2022
4. Villanova at Georgetown – 1/22/2022
5. UConn at St. John’s – 2/13/2022
6. Villanova at UConn – 2/22/2022

Looking Ahead

We await the coach’s preseason poll. Here are last year results:

Rank	Preseason Votes	Final Standings
1	Villanova (9)	Villanova (-)
2	Creighton (2)	Creighton (-)
3	Providence	UConn (+1)
4	UConn	St. John’s (+5)
5	Seton Hall	Seton Hall (-)
6	Marquette	Providence (-3)
7	Xavier	Xavier (-)
8	Butler	Georgetown (+3)
9	St. John’s	Marquette (-3)
10	DePaul	Butler (-2)
11	Georgetown	DePaul (-)