I can remember a time back when the Big East expanded to add Louisville, Cincinnati, DePaul, Marquette and South Florida and the basketball coaches had no problem … as long as it didn’t mean the league schedule would be altered. Adding teams wasn’t the issue. Adding games was, especially when one considers how good the Big East already was.

As we know, it happened this season and you’ve obviously seen 16 teams bludgeon one another for more than two months now. What we have are between six and eight teams most likely to earn an NCAA Tournament bid.

That’s nothing new.

How we’ve arrived here is new, though, and you only need to look at WVU to understand why.

After 16 league games, the Mountaineers were 9-7, which is a very good league record. Of course, they were 9-7 last year and didn’t get in. Given two more games, they not only had two more chances to win and add to their cause — 11 Big East wins and a top-five finish are both possible — but they beat Pitt and have chance to win on the road for the fourth time conference play. That would also be nine road/neutral wins, which is as many as Georgetown and Louisville. That’s pretty good company.

Good company is what this experiment is all about, too.

What separates the Big East from the other majors is that it has so many teams (16), so many capable teams (11, at least) and so many low-level teams that won’t quit. It’s a young league, with 16 of its top 20 scorers underclassmen, which may account for why no team has surrendered. Nearly one in four Big East games has been decided by a single possession or in overtime. That’s twice as many as in the Big Ten.