Louisville columnist agrees with my take that the new members are facing a bit of bias.

Never mind football. Basketball is where the Big East will make fireworks crackle and the ground shake. In basketball, love for U of L and its four fellow newcomers from Conference USA is tougher to find than a midtown Manhattan parking place.

“It’s fair,” Villanova guard Allan Ray said. “They’re the new kids on the block. When you’re new, you need to come in and earn your respect. That’s just life.”

“It’s like being a freshman player coming into this league,” said Syracuse senior Gerry McNamara. “You have to prove what you can do. It’s not given to you.”

Actually, what was given to U of L, Cincinnati, DePaul, Marquette and South Florida was a hard time, powerful incentive to legitimately play the “no respect” hymn from now until the league reassembles in Madison Square Garden for the Big East Tournament on March 8.

Preseason predictions are risky business. But if you can learn one thing from the predictions filed at Big East basketball media day yesterday, it is this:

The five newcomers from C-USA will have to take a number before they are given much love from the 11 Big East holdovers.

At the end, though, he hedges that maybe the BE coaches know more about the league than he and the new teams.

I guess the way I look at it, is that in predicting the team ranks there are 3 groupings of teams. Top (1-4), Middle (5-12), and Low(13-16). In roughly each grouping, what you see are the old C-USA teams in the bottom portion of each group.