I’m using my ratings and Bill James’ log5 formula to estimate the chances of each participating team advancing to a particular round of its conference tournament.

Big East Conference
Location: New York (Madison Square Garden)
Dates: March 12-15
Chance of bid thief: 17%
Current kPOY: Doug McDermott, Creighton

Projections:

              Qtrs  Semis  Final  Champ
 1 Villanova   100   85.8   60.1   37.6
 2 Creighton   100   78.4   58.7   32.8
 5 St. John's  100   64.7   25.9   12.4
 3 Xavier      100   57.0   19.0    6.4
 4 Providence  100   35.3    9.9    3.4
 6 Marquette   100   43.0   11.9    3.3
 7 Georgetown 82.4   20.4   10.1    3.1
 8 Seton Hall 51.3    7.4    2.2    0.5
 9 Butler     48.7    6.8    1.9    0.4
10 DePaul     17.6    1.2    0.2    0.02

How much does head-to-head play matter? Creighton beat Villanova in two matchups by a combined 49 points, but Villanova was four games better than Creighton against the rest of the Big East schedule. I’d have to think a third match-up would be competitive, and the Wildcats are made the slight favorite to win the tournament even with giving St. John’s home-court advantage for a potential semi-final game. The fact is, the odds are against a third Villanova-Creighton game, so we may never know how another contest would turn out.

The Big East has been unfairly maligned this year basically because, from what I can tell, it doesn’t have enough teams. More specifically, it doesn’t have enough good teams, and really what that means is enough tournament teams. Heading into this event, the conference only has three teams considered safe by the nation’s bracketologists and those are top three seeds of Villanova, Creighton and Xavier, and even Xavier is no certainty should they drop a quarterfinal game with Marquette. (The bid thief calculation assumes those teams are in.)

St. John’s, Providence, and Georgetown are lurking and with two wins maybe they join the party. Providence and St. John’s are matched up in a quarterfinal game, so one of them will get helped by that. Anyway, back to my original plan for the Big East. Get three or four more teams into your league. Maybe you get another bid or two, and that’s what the national media tends to value when judging conferences.