Things are starting to heat up as we inch closer to another Big East basketball season: preseason coaches’ polls are dropping, award watch lists are making the rounds, and once again, the league’s coaches and player reps descended on Madison Square Garden for Big East Media Day. It’s the unofficial tip-off to the season, and every year when it rolls around, I can’t help but flash back to one of my all-time favorite Media Day moments with Luwane Pipkins and Georgetown’s Mac McClung. You know the one. Absolute classic.
Pip was on his way to becoming a Friar legend in his lone year at Providence before the season got shut down right before the tournament.
As for this upcoming season, the Friars were picked to finish 4th in the league, coming in behind the usual suspects of St. John’s, UConn, and Creighton.
All things considered (no Friars on the preseason All-Big East First Team), I’d say that preseason ranking is about as good as we could’ve hoped for. Honestly, it’s right around where I had us slotted in my own rankings (which I’ll be dropping soon, so stay tuned). You could go back and forth all day on whether Providence or Marquette deserves the 4-spot versus the 5-spot. Both sides have a case. But with the chaos of the transfer portal and rotations that will still shaking out into the beginning of the season, it’s getting harder and harder to get a true read on teams this early.
I’ll say it what I say before every single college basketball season…I absolutely hate the way they put together the All-Big East teams. It makes zero sense. There are 19 players spread across the First, Second, and Third Teams. What are we doing here? It’s supposed to be five per team. That’s how basketball works. That’s how teams work. And somehow, the preseason Big East Player of the Year, Zuby Ejiofor, isn’t even included on the First Team, which would make the team have 7 freaking players on it. It’s one of the weirdest quirks of the whole process and honestly just waters the whole thing down.
The Friars landed a pair of names on the preseason All-Big East teams heading into the 2025–26 campaign. Newcomer Jason Edwards earned a spot on the Second Team, while returning All-Freshman Team selection Oswin made the Third Team. Both guys were among the four players who joined Coach Kim English at Madison Square Garden this week for Big East Media Day duties. There were interviews, photo ops, and the usual round of hype-building for every team in the conference. Rounding out the Friars crew in NYC were Corey Floyd and Jaylin Sellers.
P.S. I may already be obsessed with Jason Edwards’ vibes and personality. Guy is like a magnet of positive energy.
Speaking of Jaylin Sellers, the Friars have already gotten their first taste of the kinds of plays the young man is going to be putting on display this season with an absolute banger of a highlight clip from the team’s first exhibition game at Pitt…which was still somehow untelevised in today’s day and age of media.
The fact that they have a highlights of the game video on YouTube is especially irritating, meaning they had every thing needed to be televising this game, somewhere, someplace.
The reasons for being excited for the season are continuing to pile up and I’m sure we’ll get even more clips, podcasts, tweets, and hype videos before the first game of the year at home against Holy Cross.
The Morning Hangover 
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