Connecticut News, NCAA Tournament

BIG EAST LESSONS PROVE FRUITFUL FOR NATIONAL CHAMPION UCONN

The BIG EAST conference took its share of hits over the past three and a half weeks, and deservedly so. The conference sent an NCAA Tournament record 11 teams into the Madness and after the first weekend only two teams were left. Making matters worse Connecticut and Marquette advanced into the second week of the tournament by beating fellow conference rivals. In other words, the BIG EAST was 0-3 in Round Two against non-BIG EAST foes.

After that first weekend the conference was bruised and battered with a cumulative record of just 9-9. The top eight finishers in the league’s regular season all saw their season’s end without reaching the Sweet 16. All that was left was Marquette and Connecticut, two teams that finished 9-9 in regular season BIG EAST play.

“I heard some comments about our league,” said UConn coach Jim Calhoun Monday night in Houston after the Huskies beat Butler 53-41 to earn the National Championship. “I’m a Big East parochial guy, and I have a reason to be.”

When Marquette was trounced by North Carolina in the Sweet 16 in Newark (NJ), Connecticut was left all by alone to carry the conference’s banner deep into the NCAA’s. A win over San Diego State in Anaheim put Jim Calhoun in position to reach his fourth final four since 1999 with one more victory. After surviving a last second attempt to win the game by Arizona, the Huskies moved on to Houston and two more victories later they were national champions for the third time.

“One of the reasons we were able to do some of the things within the tournament was because of the…great coaches that exist in our league,” said Calhoun. “They help prepare us for the moments when we couldn’t make a basket, like the first half (against Butler), and we had to come up with something different.”

Connecticut limped into the postseason, losers of four of their last five regular season games. Their talented freshman class looked to have hit the wall and Kemba Walker was surely tiring from the long grind of a season. Their 9-9 conference record and ninth place finish in the BIG EAST felt like an accomplishment to the players.

“Like they say, we had a lot of doubters, picked to finish 10th in the Big East,” said freshman Jeremy Lamb who scored 12 second half points in the championship game. “We finished 9th, but I still thought we overachieved”.

The BIG EAST Tournament started off innocently enough with an opening round drubbing of DePaul on Tuesday afternoon and the same on Wednesday against a reeling Georgetown that was without Chris Wright. The turning point for the Huskies seemed to come the next afternoon at Madison Square Garden.

Facing the conference tournament’s No. 1 Seed Pittsburgh, UConn stunned the Panthers on a Kemba Walker step-back jumper as the buzzer sounded. The jumper capped a see-saw second half and finished off a rally that saw the Huskies trail by as many as 12 points in the first half. The three wins in three days was already a special accomplishment, but now the entire team and their coach felt something even more special was possibly.

Calhoun referenced that win in the last few days of providing the evidence he needed to believe his team could be playing Monday night for a national title. They showed heart, toughness and effort against a program that epitomized those characteristics in the BIG EAST and those traits were needed to complete their post season run that saw them finish off five wins in five days for the BIG EAST championship and take on a Butler team that used many of the same characteristics to reach their spot in the finals.

“I can tell the way they play, they gave it everything they have,” Calhoun said of Butler. “When I saw the kid (Matt) Howard hurt, I didn’t like that. I’m serious. I didn’t like that because he gave so much during the game. Both teams were matching that. To me that’s beauty. That’s what this game should be about.

“It was two teams that weren’t going to give into each other and finally our superiority took over. But, damn, I loved it in the sense of the fact of the fight, competitiveness between the two teams.”

In other words, it was a BIG EAST game. The young Huskies, guided by their star junior Kemba Walker and Hall of Fame coach Jim Calhoun, grew up together through the season.

“For everybody involved, they truly were brothers, they truly were trusting of each other and very, very special,” said Calhoun.”

Brothers who grew up quickly from the lessons learned in the BIG EAST conference.

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