Villanova’s national championship is the only validation the ‘new’ Big East needs

For the past three years, the word “new” has grated the ears of Big East basketball supporters in a way they could have never imagined before the most recent helping of conference realignment.

Sure, the Big East -- now sans college basketball powerhouses like Connecticut, Louisville, Syracuse, Pittsburgh and others -- was its old self in name only, but that wasn’t the point. Each and every time that someone referred to the league as the “new Big East,” those three extra letters implied three extra words: not as good.

For the past three seasons, the Big East has been one of the top five conferences in the country according to any metric that’s available for consumption. But since the start of the 2013-14 season, the conference has been competing with its own past as much as it has the ACC or the Big Ten. The loss of a handful of its most recognizable names, a new television deal that took its games off ESPN and a few NCAA Tournament flops had seemed to cement the league’s status as a good, but not great spin-off of one of America’s most popular shows. For a lot of the sports public, the Big East was essentially a slightly more entertaining “Joey.”

Perception is a tough thing to shake, especially in major college athletics. That being the case, it was always going to take something extraordinary from one of its flagship programs for the Big East to take the gigantic step necessary to step fully out of its own shadow.

I present to you Kris Jenkins: Patron saint of the new Big East.

The moment Jenkins’ shot ripped through the net inside NRG Stadium, it ushered in a new era for the Big East, one where “new” could no longer exist as an insult. When something like that happens, it opens new windows for an audience to see things that were there all along. Before April 4, 2016, all those things were clouded by what the conference lost from its past era, and what it couldn’t seem to accomplish in its new one.

The Big East sent four teams to the 2014 NCAA Tournament, and those four teams combined for exactly two victories and zero trips to the Sweet 16. Not only did second-seeded ‘Nova and three-seed Creighton do nothing to reward the confidence that the Selection Committee placed in both them by getting bounced in the Round of 32, but they did so by an embarrassing combined total of 42 points.

The story was the same for the league a year later, when six teams (more than half the league) heard their names called on Selection Sunday. Headlined by No. 1 seed Villanova’s second-round loss to NC State, the Big East flopped again in March. Just one of the conference’s six teams, Xavier, made it to the tournament’s second weekend, and none appeared in a regional final.

There was a sense heading into the 2015-16 season that the aura of the Big East name could only carry 10 teams so far before the hoops world starts clamoring for results on the sport’s biggest stage. A conference that sent more than half its squads to the Big Dance was certainly one worthy of praise, but that praise was unlikely to come until at least one of them made a legitimate run at a national title.

Patron Saint Kris Jenkins.

Villanova’s near-perfect run to the national championship allows for certain facts to be stated now without the accompaniment of any caveat. For instance, the Big East has sent half of its teams (15 out of 30) to the NCAA Tournament in its three-year existence. According to the RPI, the conference has been the fourth, second and third-strongest league, respectively, in Division I the past three seasons. Those statements no longer have to be attached at the hip to clichés reminding us that, of course, “March is the ultimate test.”

That test has finally been aced, and it’s hard to blame those who took a leap of faith with Villanova four years ago for celebrating nearly as much as the Wildcats. There were no guarantees when the so-called “Catholic 7” elected to branch out on their own in March of 2013, and there were no guarantees when Xavier, Butler and Creighton left quality conferences to join them. There were plenty of doubters who thought the storied Big East Tournament would never sell out again, something which happened this past March for the first time since the previous form of the league disbanded in 2013.

All this has made the conference one of the tightest-knit communities in college basketball, something Villanova coach Jay Wright alluded to hours after the biggest victory of his professional career.

“Someone said to me today that I feel like we’ve got that old camaraderie of the old Big East back,” Wright said. “When it got too big, that we lost a little bit. I can say confidently that we do have a great relationship amongst all the coaches in the Big East. When we play each other, I mean, we want to kill each other. We’re going at it. But when it comes tournament time, we really do pull together. We talk to each other. We have texts going between all of us that were in the tournament.”

That camaraderie was on full display for all to see in the hours both before and after the Wildcats knocked off the ACC’s best to claim the national championship.

“It’s just because we’re basketball guys,” Wright said of the atypical league camaraderie. “We’re in this new world of college athletics that’s organized by football. We’re just trying to find our place. We feel like we need each other. We all need to be good. We want each other to be good. We really do support each other.

“But don’t at any time think when we play each other, or when we’re recruiting against each other, we’re not going against each other. It’s like the old-school Big East.”

It’s a safe assumption that this is where the Big East is going to reside from now on, a place where it’s known for both the familiar attributes of its past and the contemporary strengths of its present. New, old or whatever, Villanova’s 2016 postseason run has afforded the Big East to be seen in the light its most comfortable with: The light of a conference that is among the best in college basketball, the light of a conference capable of producing champions.