2009 Big East Men's Basketball Tournament

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:

    “One of the things I considered a delightful experience in school was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I didn’t realize the gap was so big from the Founding Fathers until now. And I didn’t realize they weren’t talking about me.”
    —Maxine Waters (b. 1938)

    “The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.”
    —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    “All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.”
    —Rebecca West (1892–1983)

    “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)