The 2009 Big East Men's Basketball Tournament, a part of the 2008-09 NCAA Division I men's basketball season, took place in March 2009 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Louisville Cardinals defeated the Syracuse Orange 76–66 in the tournament finals to earn the Big East Tournament championship for the first time, and received the Big East Conference's automatic bid to the 2009 NCAA Tournament.
This was the first Big East tournament to include all 16 of the conference's teams. The teams finishing 9 through 16 in the regular season standings played first round games, while teams 5 through 8 received byes to the second round. The top 4 teams during the regular season received double-byes to the quarterfinals. The 2009 tournament featured a conference record six-overtime quarterfinals game (the second longest game in NCAA history) in which Syracuse defeated UConn 127–117.
Read more about 2009 Big East Men's Basketball Tournament: Bracket, Syracuse Vs. Connecticut
Famous quotes containing the words big, east, men and/or basketball:
“We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”
—Harriet Tubman (1821–1913)
“Once did She hold the gorgeous East in fee;
And was the safeguard of the West:”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.””
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)