Big East Basketball Tournament

The Big East Men's Basketball Tournament is a championship tournament in the men's basketball. The winning team gets the automatic bid of the conference to NCAA's Men's Division I Basketball Championship. Starting with 1983 the tournament is being held in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The tournament is the longest running conference in college basketball. Before 2009 only 12 teams were in the conference but starting with 2009 it was expanded to 16. The first 9 to 16 teams play first-round games and the 5 to 8 teams get a bye into the second round and four of the top teams get a double-bye into the quarter finals.

Also in 2009 the tournament had a game with six-overtimes, this was the quarterfinals game between the Connecticut Huskies and the Syracuse Orange, the Syracuse won the game with a score of 127 to 117. The overtimes made it the second-longest game in the history of the NCAA; the game started in the evening of March 12 and ended in the early morning hours of March 13.

For the seeding procedure the members are seeded based on their conference records. Games outside the Big East are ignored then tiers are broken down using tiebreaker rules. Usually the first two tiebreakers are very close and then the others are played against the next best conference team.

Something else that is noteworthy about the Big East conference is that it's the only conference had every of it's games broadcast on TV nationwide and in 2011 for the first time it was broadcast in 3D on the channel ESPN3D. Also in 2011 Connecticut was the first team in the Big East to ever win 5 games in a row in 5 days and win the championship.

To learn more about the Big East and for a 2012 Big East basketball tournament schedule please visit our site.