Big East and Big Ten announce season tipoff challenge

Starting in the 2015-16 season and running for at least the next eight years, the Big East and Big Ten will meet in a season opening four day, eight game extravaganza. The definitely not a tournament (teams can only participate in one per year) event will be known as the Dave Gavitt Tipoff Games in honor of the founder of the Big East. Gavitt was also instrumental in the creation of the first Dream Team and was a mentor of Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney.

On a Xavier-level, it's not hard to see how this could be beneficial. In addition to the quality preseason tournament that the Musketeers always feature in, there is now one more potentially high quality game on the schedule. Xavier could very easily now meet Michigan, Michigan State, or OSU before plunging into a non-conference schedule that has historically already been very good. That slate, plus the Big East regular season, promise to put Xavier in a position of constant contention.

And Sports Illustrated ran a photo of Semaj with the article. Because doing the extra work to take five seconds to find a picture of a current player would have been too much.