Big East Media Day for the 2024-2025 basketball season was held at Madison Square Garden on today and with it, the announcement of the preseason Big East awards and conference rankings. The Providence Friars checked in at number 6 in the preseason standings and although preseason projections and prognostications don’t really mean all that much, it does give the coaching staff and team a little more incentive to stick it to the naysayers…whoever they may be. In reality, after the reining back-to-back champion UConn Huskies, you could make a case for pretty much any order for number 2 through 6 and have a pretty good argument to stand behind.

I really, really want to know who the one vote was from for Marquette to be in the number 1 spot heading into this season.

As for the preseason Big East Awards, Bryce Hopkins was named to the First Team All-Big East, despite the fact that he will be returning from a season-ending knee injury.

That tells us two things in my opinion. One, these coaches remember just how damn good Bryce Hopkins was to be named one of one two unanimous selections to the First Team in his last full season. And two, there are a lot of top players who are no longer in the Big East (Tyler Kolek, Donovan Clingan, Tristen Newton, Baylor Scheierman, Trey Alexander, Oso Iguadaro, Cam Spencer, Joel Soriano, Devin Carter, Josh Oduro, Stephen Castle, Quincy Olivari, Daniss Jenkins, & the entire Seton Hall basketball team).

Hopkins is joined on this year’s preseason All-Big East First Team by a slew of conference veterans including Kadary Richmond (now at St. John’s), Kam Jones (Marquette), Alex Karaban (UConn), Eric Dixon (Villanova), and preseason Player of the Year, Ryan Kalkbrenner (Creighton).

I continue to hate the fact that they name 6 players to the First Team and try to sneak it by with a loophole of having the Player of the Year AND 5 other players. I’ll admit, I am a bit surprised by Kalkbrenner being the POY selection but the Bluejays will need a lot more scoring out of him for this upcoming season so we’ll just have to wait and see if he’s up to the task.

There were no other Friars named to the 2nd or 3rd Teams, which I don’t think will hold true in the end of the season dishing out of Awards.

I will absolutely say, that I am not especially psyched about all this chatter of nagging injuries to the team before the season even starts. English and his crew did a lot of work to address the depth of this year’s squad but we still need more than 7 or 8 guys to suit up for game day.

Bryce Hopkins Named to Preseason Big East 1st-Team, Friars Picked to Finish 6th

After everything, easily my favorite moment of Media Day was when Ed Cooley was actually asked by the Media about the rumors of him taking over the Virginia job from thee recently retired Tony Bennett. *chefs kiss*

“What are the rumors?”