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We are the champions: Before the season, folks were about split about who they thought the best team in the Big East was. Four months later, and it appears that those two teams will play for the right to call itself the best when Louisville travels to Washington to play Georgetown on Saturday. Both teams are 14-3 in conference and off in this mid-week and therefore have about a week to prepare. Georgetown will have to figure out how it can get an inside game going that will earn it more than the four free throws the Hoyas shot in Louisville a month ago. Louisville will just be trying to cap a tremendous run of excellent basketball. The Cardinals have won nine straight, including a 14-point win over Villanova on Sunday.

Regardless of who wins on Saturday -- and barring a Georgetown blowout win -- I'll maintain that Louisville is the best team in the conference. No team has been as consistently excellent for the better part of six weeks, no team is as deep and no team has as much of a look of a Final Four team as this Louisville team does.

For Georgetown, the win at Marquette was another reminder that the best way to beat the Hoyas is to put them away before the final possessions. Few teams in recent memory have been as good as the Hoyas at bleeding the end of the game to their advantage. We saw it so many times last season -- including on a couple of memorable NCAA Tournament occasions -- and now Georgetown can add this overtime win at Marquette to Villanova, Syracuse, West Virginia and Connecticut on the list of teams that had the Hoyas dead to rights but couldn't finish them off.

If you're looking for a beautiful game of basketball at the Verizon Center on Saturday, you'll be out of luck. These are the two best defensive teams in the conference, and Georgetown especially has been mediocre on offense of late. This is not the deadly efficient offensive Hoyas of a year ago. This is a team that will have guys like Patrick Ewing and Jeremiah Rivers on the floor at crucial times because John Thompson III knows that his team has a better shot at winning by shutting down its opponents rather than trying to out-execute them on offense.

West Virginia is in good shape, unless ... : There's been a lot of talk over the last few days about what the Mountaineers have to do to get into the NCAA Tournament. Everywhere I go in the city -- from Battery Park to Washington Heights -- people ask me, "What do you think of Joe Alexander and the Mountaineers? Are they going to get in? What do they need to do?" I can't walk a block in SoHo or Yorkville without someone stopping me with questions about West Virginia.

With a 21-9 record overall last season -- and 9-7 in conference -- West Virginia was deemed ill-fit (and rightly so) for the NCAA Tournament. WVU then raced through the NIT with hardly a challenge, capturing the title and looking like one of the best 20 or 30 teams in the country in doing so. There was little doubt last year that West Virginia was one of the 34 best at-large teams, but the wins weren't there to prove the point. West Virginia was 5-8 against teams in the RPI's top 100 last season and also had a loss to a very poor Cincinnati team. An impressive home win over UCLA could not undo the damage of the facts in the previous sentence.

At first glance, things appear to look the same in 2008. West Virginia has just two wins against teams with winning conference records in the Big East, meaning that eight of its conference wins -- a number likely to become nine on Saturday at St. John's -- are against lower-tiered Big East teams.

But there are a few key differences. The first is that, with the possible exception of a home loss against Cincinnati, there aren't any bad losses to point to on this WVU schedule. The second difference is the extreme number of narrow losses this season. Games against Tennessee, Oklahoma, Georgetown and Pittsburgh were all decided in overtime or in the final possession, and all results went against Bob Huggins' team. The only similarly close win for West Virginia was a two-point victory over rival Marshall in a game the 'Neers nearly gave away.

The third difference looks to the strength of the conference. Regardless of what Digger Phelps might think, the Big East is far stronger this season -- both at the top and bottom. Last year's Big East had six teams outside the RPI's top 110; this year's has just four. Last year's Big East had four teams in the RPI's top 30; this year's has six. The strength of the league is a big reason why West Virginia, despite being 20-9 and 10-7 -- just slightly better than last season's finish -- is 35th in the latest RPI rankings, 22 spots higher than its 57th-place finish of a season ago.

All this is to say that, assuming West Virginia goes to New York and beats the Red Storm on Saturday, the Mountaineers should be in. Surely an 11th conference win and 21st overall would be enough to punch a ticket to the Dance. But if I were in gold and blue, I would need a win in the first-round Big East Tournament game so as to avoid any queasiness on Selection Sunday.

Fight for the right: There's no backing into the Big East Tournament, and this will be the last March when that's true. Starting in 2009, he conference will invite all 16 teams to the Garden for a five-day super tournament that includes such novelties as the double-bye. But all that's for next year. This year, four teams won't be going to New York for the start of the Big East Tournament next Wednesday, and we already know that USF and Rutgers will be two of the teams. Three teams -- DePaul, Providence and St. John's -- sit at 5-11 and are fighting for the very last spot and the right to become a foil for (likely) Marquette in the first round.

DePaul holds the three-way tie-breaker right now because of the Blue Demons' win at St. John's in January. DePaul split with Providence, and the Friars lost by two at St. John's. If DePaul and Providence were to end up in a two-way tie at 6-12 (or 7-11), Providence would likely win the tie-breaker. The next tie-breaker after head-to-head is record against each team in the conference, beginning at the top and working toward the bottom. Basically, whichever team has the better win gets the nod. DePaul's best win came in the conference opener against Villanova, but Providence won at Connecticut. The best the Demons could do to improve that tie-breaker is to defeat Pittsburgh on Sunday, but the Panthers are still going to finish well behind the Huskies in the standings.

Now we know how things shake out in the case of a tie -- DePaul over St. John's, St. John's over Providence, Providence over DePaul, DePaul in a three-way tie -- but how likely is it that any of these teams moves off five wins in the last week?

DePaul finishes with road games at Cincinnati on Thursday and in Pittsburgh on Sunday. The Bearcats are not playing good ball right now but are still a clear favorite against the defensively-challenged Demons. DePaul is just 1-9 in its last 10 games with the only win at home against South Florida.

After starting 1-7 in conference, St. John's has split its last eight conference games to get into position to earn a spot at the Garden. The Johnnies' most recent win, a 65-62 victory over Seton Hall, knocked their metro rivals out of at-large consideration and also opened the Norm Roberts post-extension era with a success. But the reality of the last week of the schedule must now set in. St. John's travels to Notre Dame on Wednesday before hosting West Virginia on Saturday. I put SJU's chances of another win at about one-in-four.

Providence seemed about as dead as possible entering Sunday's game at Cincinnati. The Friars had lost nine of 10, seen another point guard go down with an injury and were faced with the near certainty that head coach Tim Welsh was coaching his final games on Smith Hill. But a remarkable performance in the Queen City adds relevance to this final week of the season. The Friars are home for two games, and according to Ken Pomeroy's projections, each game is more winnable than any that SJU or DePaul plays. The Saturday game with Villanova is almost certainly the best chance any of these teams has for a win this week, especially considering that Providence will ride the emotion of retiring the jerseys of three legends -- Jimmy Walker, Marvin Barnes and Ernie DiGregorio -- in ceremonies on Saturday.

It seems better than an even-money proposition that DePaul will enter its Sunday matchup at Pittsburgh needing a win to qualifying for the Big East Tournament.

Power rankings:

1. Louisville: Forget the final margins, the Cardinals dominated two solid opponents this week to confirm their position atop this list.
2. Georgetown: The Hoyas still aren't hitting shots, but this team has something in common with last year's -- guts.
3. Connecticut: The win over West Virginia was a performance more in line with what we've come to expect from the Huskies. But where did Hasheem Thabeet go?
4. Marquette: It was an achingly disappointing loss for the Golden Eagles, who did everything they needed to against Georgetown on Saturday, except make shots.
5. Notre Dame: There is surely no better fifth-best team in a conference than this one. Just as surely, Luke Harangody sealed up the conference's Player of the Year with his performance in a loss at Louisville.
6. West Virginia: Missed opportunities will haunt the Mountaineers if they are snubbed on Selection Sunday. But this year's omission would be unjust if WVU can get an 11th conference win.
7. Pittsburgh: The Panthers don't appear capable of getting back to the point where they are a Big East contender, and it looks as if their season will end somewhere far short of what they hoped for in December. Still, a few days in March can change everything.
8. Syracuse: As painful as Marquette's loss to Georgetown was, Syracuse's loss to Pittsburgh was more detrimental. A win would have given Syracuse a very good look at an NCAA Tournament bid, but, by blowing an 11-point second half lead and losing by five, the Orange now face a situation where it needs at least three more wins and some help. A trip to Seton Hall and home game with Marquette have to end in SU victories, or the Orange's at-large hopes are futile.
9. Villanova: The Wildcats needed to split last week's games to stay around the at-large cut line. With games against USF and Providence this week, Villanova doesn't have any opportunities to improve its profile. Even with two wins this week, the Cats will probably need two more in New York.
10. Cincinnati: The Bearcats have started to come back to earth. There's no reason why they should have lost to a banged-up and pretty poor Providence team. At 13-15, UC needs to win at least three more games to even have a shot at a postseason berth.
11. Seton Hall: The Pirates couldn't afford another regular-season loss, especially to a mediocre team like St. John's, but that's exactly what happened on Saturday. Seton Hall can now only hope to spoil Syracuse's NCAA hopes and secure an NIT bid with a strong finish.
12. Providence: The Friars can tantalize with their talent, but they brought energy and heart in their suitcases for the trip to Cincinnati. It's surely too little, too late for this team and its coach, but the win was a nice farewell gift for a coach who has worked so hard at Providence, even if he hasn't had the results to show for it.
13. DePaul: Perhaps this team will start playing defense next season. If it doesn't D up in either of its last two conference games, it may not get what seemed like a sure Big East Tournament bid after a 4-2 start.
14. St. John's: The Red Storm built off its solid performance at Georgetown and managed a win that keeps it in Big East Tournament contention.
15. South Florida: The Bulls got their first ever Big East road win on Saturday, another step on the long road to basketball respectability for Stan Heath and USF.
16. Rutgers: The three-game stretch of respectable offense that led to two wins in late January seems little more than a memory now.