And this might be the last Battle?
The Big East and the Big 12 announced the pairings for the 2024 Big East/Big 12 Battle on Thursday, and as reported by Jon Rothstein on Tuesday, YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles will take a trip a little bit west to visit Iowa State for their part of the competition this fall. The game is scheduled for Wednesday, December 4th, and since the Big 12 holds the rights to ISU home games, the game will be on an ESPN network one way or another.
Here are the games that will be hosted by the Big East teams:
Baylor at UConn
Kansas at Creighton
BYU at Providence
Oklahoma State at Seton Hall
Kansas State at St. John’s
Cincinnati at Villanova
And here are the games that the Big 12 teams will host:
Butler at Houston
Marquette at Iowa State
Xavier at TCU
DePaul at Texas Tech
Georgetown at West Virginia
The first and most obvious thing that jumps out at you is “Why is this lopsided with 6 and 5,” but that’s only because there are 11 Big East teams, it was going to land with a weird split one way or another as long as every Big East squad was in.
The next thing that jumps out at you is not just the fact that UCF got left out, but the Big 12 is not including any of the four new members that will be joining the league in July. There could be a game with Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, or Colorado in there, but presumably much for the same reasons that the Big East left UConn out in their first year when there were only 10 Big 12 teams, the Big 12 is rewarding their existing membership…… other than UCF. Is that mean, considering that Oklahoma State and West Virginia finished last season tied for last place, three games behind UCF? Maybe, but I’m not commissioner of the Big 12.
As for Iowa State specifically, it would seem that the two leagues were interested in putting together what should be a marquee non-conference game. T.J. Otzelberger was hired at ISU at the same time as Shaka Smart was hired at Marquette, and the two men have enjoyed relatively similar rocket shots to success. Otzelberger, a former Wisconsin high school team coach, took over a Cyclone program that had just gone 2-22 and winless in the Big 12 and guided them to a #11 seed in the NCAA tournament…. and capped that year with a surprise trip to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament. Iowa State improved from that first year in league play if not overall, and bumped their NCAA seed up to a 6. This past season was the best ISU season on record in the KenPom database, as they finished the year ranked #8. The Cyclones finished second in the monster league that is the Big 12, earned a #2 seed in the NCAA tournament, their first top four seeding since 2016, and advanced to the Sweet 16 for the second time in three seasons under Otzelberger’s guidance.
If you’re wondering “yes, but are they going to be good again next year,” well, that’s what we have the preliminary and still shifting BartTorvik.com preseason rankings for. As of Thursday morning, Iowa State is currently projected as the preseason #1 team in the country. So yeah, they’ll probably be good. Things might shift between now and November, but it’s worth noting that Houston is sitting at #2, so Iowa State might not end up as the preseason favorite to win the Big 12 even if they’re still a top five team. As far as intentionally booking a marquee non-conference game goes: Marquette is currently #15…… and that’s third in the Big East behind #13 Xavier and #14 UConn.
Marquette is 5-3 all time against Iowa State. Four of those eight meetings happened in the early 1960s, with the two teams each winning two games at home. They didn’t play again until a first round game in the 1984 NIT that went Marquette’s way in Ames, and then didn’t play again until a home-and-home series in 1996 and 1997 that MU swept. The most recent contest was in the 2004 NIT, and while it was once again at ISU, this time the Cyclones got the W to snap a three game Marquette winning streak.
Would you like to watch that whole game on YouTube for some reason?
That locks in the mystery around one of what is now four known non-conference games for Marquette. We knew there would be a Big East/Big 12 Battle game, the details were up in the air. The only other three known games on the slate are the yearly tilt with Wisconsin which will be in Milwaukee this season, a one-off trip to the Bahamas to face Georgia, and yesterday’s newly announced game at Purdue. There is no Gavitt Tipoff Games series this season, as the Big Ten coaches were reluctant to renew the deal because they didn’t have a schedule format decided on with the addition of USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon to the league for 2024-25.
You can check out the Big East’s entire press release on the Battle with the Big 12 right here.