Seton Hall was picked to finish fifth in the Big East Conference in the preseason Coaches' poll on Wednesday.
Villanova, among the favorites to win the 2021 NCAA championship, is the favorite to win the league, followed by Creighton, Providence and UConn, which re-enters the Big East this season under coach Dan Hurley.
After Seton Hall at No. 5, Marquette, Xavier, Butler, St. John’s, DePaul and Georgetown round out the projected picks.
“It never matters to me, to be perfectly honest,” Pirates senior forward Sandro Mamukelashvili, who was named to the All-Big East First Team, told NJ Advance Media. “I know how we play. Every time we step on the court, we just put our hearts out there and play harder than the team we’re playing against so to be honest, it’s always great seeing yourself high in the polls but at the same time, it’s basketball. Whoever plays harder and whoever wants more, wins, so I feel like we ... are going to show everybody that we’re better than they think we are.”
After being picked to win the league last year, Seton Hall had two chances to clinch the program’s first outright Big East crown since 1993 but lost at home to Villanova on Senior Night and at Creighton to close the season. The Pirates finished in a three-way tie atop the Big East with those two schools.
“I think the league is going to be much more balanced out than year’s past,” Pirates coach Kevin Willard said recently. “I think UConn coming in and [the league schedule] going to 20 games, I think it’s just going to add two more incredibly tough games. I don’t know what the bottom of the conference is going to look like, but I think 1 through 8 or 9 is going to be really strong.”
Villanova is once again the favorite to win the Big East after having won at least a share of six of the last seven regular-season crowns.
The Wildcats lost Saddiq Bey to the NBA Draft but return sophomore Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, who pulled out of the Draft and is also on the Preseason First Team. Villanova once again has a deep and diverse team of interchangeable parts, including Tinton Falls native and former Ranney School star Bryan Antoine, who is returning from shoulder surgery.
“I think we’re going to be able to play guys like Jeremiah, [Tulane transfer] Caleb [Daniels], [Brandon] Slater at different positions,” Villanova coach Jay Wright said on a recent Zoom call. “I think sometimes we’re going to be able to play big. We’re not going to be able to play small that much, we’ve kind of learned that about our team. We have Chris Arcidiacono, Caleb, Collin [Gillespie] and Justin Moore. You’re still 6-4, 6-5, 6-3 and 6-4 [out on the perimeter]. We don’t have any little guys. … Collin is, I guess. But we have pretty good team size, we’ve learned that. We will be able to have different lineups with three, four guards. And sometimes three, four forwards.”
Creighton features one of the league’s best coaches in Greg McDermott and the Big East Preseason Player of the Year in junior guard Marcus Zegarowski, who averaged 16.1 points, 5.0 assists and 3.8 rebounds last season.
UConn returns to its geographic home in the Big East with Hurley leading the way. The former Seton Hall standout and Rutgers assistant coach has the most experienced and versatile team in his three-year tenure with the Huskies. Senior guard R.J. Cole, the Linden native and former St. Anthony’s High School star, is expected to play a major role after sitting out last season following his transfer from Howard.
As a sophomore at Howard, Cole appeared in all 34 games, starting 33, and averaging 21.4 points, 4.1 rebounds, 6.4 assists, 1.8 steals, with a 2.0 assist-to-turnover ratio en route to being named the MEAC Player of the Year.
“We just want to take another big step in the program and continue to make progress,” Hurley said recently. “People are going to pick us relatively high in a new league but we’re not going to get seduced into thinking that we’ve arrived. We’ve got to show up.”
PIRATES WORKING TO GET OUT THE VOTE
Ahead of Election Day, Seton Hall put out a “Get out the Vote” video this week
“I feel like it was important for the whole team to register to vote because it’s obvious that we need change in this country and we want change to happen,” senior Myles Cale says in the video.
Said senior Shavar Reynolds: “The impact of voting now, it’s the most important thing, so for us to really want change to have change, we have to start in our governmental systems.”
BIG EAST TEAMS TO WEAR BLACK LIVES MATTER PATCHES
The Big East Conference announced in August that the Conference’s 11 member schools unanimously approved the display of Black Lives Matter patches on their men’s and women’s basketball uniforms for the 2020-21 season.
The NBA and the WNBA both had BLM slogans on the courts in their bubbles, while various other sports have taken similar actions. The NCAA announced this summer that it would allow student-athletes in all sports to wear patches on their uniforms for commemorative and memorial purposes, as well as to support social justice issues.
“We are proud that all eleven of our schools support the effort to bring attention through Big East basketball to the Black Lives Matter movement and its goal of a more racially just world,” said Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman.
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Adam Zagoria is a freelance reporter who covers Seton Hall and NJ college basketball for NJ Advance Media.