Eight of the ten teams in the Big East have two games left. The remaining two teams have just one game left. The bottomline is that the regular season comes to a conclusion on March 5th with all ten teams in action and the likelihood is that many of the Big East members will still be jockeying for final seeding position for the Big East Tournament that begins on March 9th at Madison Square Garden.

The first game of the tournament will be at 7pm on Wednesday, March 9th with another game that night at 9:30pm. All games will be televised on Fox Sports 1, with the finals on March 12th being televised on FOX.

Here is where we stand through games on 2/28/2016:

Seed Movement Scenarios by Matchup

In this edition of the “Seed Watch” I’ll be looking at the games on Tuesday in the Big East. I’ll analyze some scenarios if a win and some if a loss and then do this exercise again on Wednesday for the games being played that night.

#1 Villanova: 25-4, 14-2 vs. #9 DePaul: 9-19, 3-13

The only thing that’s really in play with this game is Villanova officially locking up the 1 seed by notching their 15th league win. Xavier only has 1 game remaining so the best they can do is get to 14 wins and then hope to win a tiebreaker with the Wildcats. The tiebreaker scenarios aren’t favorable to the Musketeers with their loss to Seton Hall sealing the record vs. the highest team in the standings tiebreaker for Villanova. DePaul is locked into the 9 seed at this point. This game will be televised on FS1 at 7pm ET.

#7 Marquette: 18-11, 7-9 vs. #8 Georgetown: 14-15, 7-9

This game has some implications for the bottom and middle of the Big East Tournament bracket. The potential impact on the bottom of the bracket is about who will play St. John’s in the 7/10 game and who will play DePaul in the 8/9 game on Wednesday night of the Big East Tournament. The impact on the middle of the bracket is that there are five teams bundled between 7 and 9 losses right now. Marquette has some favorable tiebreaker scenarios against some of those teams in the 7 to 9 loss range, while Georgetown would struggle in most tiebreakers. If we use Kenpom.com’s predicted win/loss scenarios for Creighton, Providence, Marquette and Georgetown, then Providence would have the 4 seed at 10-8, Butler would be the 5 at 10-8 (Providence wins the H2H tiebreaker), Creighton is the 6 seed at 9-9, Marquette is the 7 seed at 8-10 and Georgetown is the 8 seed at 7-11. One change to those records has ripple effects since these teams are all playing each other in the final games of the season. This game tips at 9pm ET on FS1.

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Mike Hopkins

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