Just a couple things.

Pitt alum and Xavier Head basketball coach Sean Miller was given an additional year on his contract. He is now contracted through 2010.

The Big East announced the entire national TV schedule for the 2005-06 season. These are games on CBS, ESPN and ESPN2.

CBS will air 5 Big East Conference games and 6 more games with a Big East team playing. Pitt will not be shown on CBS this season.

Mike DeCourcy at Sporting News has some thoughts on this TV schedule and the BE.

I don’t mean to be negative about the new, improved Big East, because this really is going to be fun while it lasts, but the inevitability that 16 members will prove to be too many struck me again when I received a press release from the conference regarding its abundance of national TV appearances.

According to the league, 31 of its regular-season games will be aired by either ESPN or ESPN2. Another five will be broadcast by CBS. That’s a total of 36 national televised league games. Add in the 11 Big East tournament games that will be shown on ESPN’s networks, and you discover that more than 33 percent of league contests will have a national TV outlet.

That’s outstanding.

But not everybody’s 100 percent excited.

Somebody at one member school confessed the other day to being a little disappointed at the number of national TV appearances apportioned to his school. Therein lies the problem the Big East will face as a league of its size: It’s impossible to keep everybody happy. And we haven’t even gotten to March to discover whether there’ll be room in the NCAA Tournament for all of the league’s successful teams.

In the aggregate, you can argue that the Big East is getting all of this exposure, but of the 11 CBS games being shown, only 5 teams from the BE are shown: UConn (5), Villanova (3), Louisville (3), WVU (3), Syracuse (1) and Georgetown (1). The number of appearances is in parenthesis.

It’s not surprising, regarding CBS, but with 16 teams vying for attention, that has to piss off some members.

Then there is the schedule on ESPN and ESPN2. There are 75 total appearances of BE teams:

Cinci, Syracuse, Louisville and ‘Nova – 9 appearances each.

UConn and ND – 7 appearances each.

WVU – 6 appearances.

DePaul – 5 appearances.
Pitt and G-town – 4 appearances.

St. John’s – 3 appearances.

Rutgers, USF and Marquette – 1 appearance each.

Providence and Seton Hall – 0 showings.

(DePaul will also be shown twice on ESPNU in games against Cinci and Louisville. More games might get added to the “U” but I’m damned if I know anyone who has that station.)

That means 6 teams will account for 2/3 of the Big East’s TV appearances on the WWLS. 5 teams account for 1/25 of the appearances.

That’s going to cause some frustration.