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[QUOTE="Brooky03, post: 2561125"]
Yup.  Wright is a great coach with some great players, but he was handed a pretty nice deck of cards when the top dogs of the old Big East bounced.  Wright had Nova in great shape for a while but the old Big East was a machine with a handful of elite teams at the top each year.  Very tough to win the conference and tougher yet to pile up enough wins to get a 1 seed.  Recruiting became easier, too.  The teams that left for the ACC no longer had as strong of a 'location' pitch because most road games are now a plane ride away, not a few hours drive.  Not to mention the irrelevance of UConn and Georgetown now.

As much as people want to prop up the new Big East as a legitimately tough conference, it's just not nearly as top heavy as the other major conferences.  It's, more or less, a conglomerate of good midmajors and old Big East rejects.  Xavier and Nova carry the conference and Xavier isn't exactly a juggernaut.  So Nova gets gifted a good conference record every year, with about 3 or 4 games deciding whether they win the conference or come in third.  Either way, they get a higher seed than they probably deserve and an easier path through the tournament.  That's no guarantee of tournament success, obviously, but Nova has done a good job of capitalizing on their opportunities.
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