Big East realignment will lead to SHU basketball recruiting woes

Another year of conference roulette taking place across the country, the Big East is taking the hardest hit of all the conferences which is not good for the top program at the university.

It's no secret that most students only follow the basketball team on campus due to being the only high profile college sport at Seton Hall, but as the quality of the conference deteriorates so will the quality of the team.

Let me be the first to say that I am a huge fan of everything the program has done over the last few years to change the team's image and the way that Kevin Willard is coaching and building his teams.

However the athletic department and coaching staff can only do so much to build the team as the conference gets weaker. One of the perks to playing basketball at the Hall has always been the ability of playing in the top basketball conference in the country.

The departure of Syracuse, one of the top five basketball programs in the nation, along with Pittsburgh and the Connecticut that seems to get closer to leaving, does not mean the end of the conference but it is the end of the conference being one of the best in the country.

With the conference going from the top conference to just another major conference it will be harder and harder for recruits to be lured to one of the smaller, less historic schools in the conference.

The bigger more historic schools staying in conference probably will not be affected that much because of the shakeup but the smaller less known nationally schools will have a much bigger challenge to lure the top recruits.

Even with the conference planning on adding schools to make up for the loss of those that left, they will not be able to replace them with the same quality of a program and what they meant to the other programs in the Big East..

With a weaker conference one of the ability for recruits to play in the top basketball conference in the country is gone, which will just make it more difficult to get the best recruits to consider the Hall.

Just two weeks ago we all waited to see if Kyle Anderson would decide to come to Seton Hall or not, but in the not so distant future I see it highly unlikely that a recruit of that stature will even have the Pirates in their final group of schools.

I am not saying that it is impossible for the basketball program to become one of the best in the country or to even just get better but at the time being the job of Kevin Willard and his coaching staff to lure recruits has just gotten a lot harder due to the conference realignment.

Steve Valenti is a junior journalism major from Lansdale, Pa. He can be reached at stephen.valenti@student.shu.edu