Payback time

Mick Cronin rather gently chided me the other night in the post-game press conference when I mentioned that his team had already won as many Big East games this year as it did all last season, as if somehow it was a crime to mentoin that 2-14 season. But the fact is that the players themselves use what happened last year as motivation for this one. They think about it every time they walk onto the court to play a Big East team.

"Now it's payback," John Williamson said. "That's what we say about all the Big East games we play. It's payback time now. We're not the same team we were last year. We've got experience now."

Cronin acknowledged in talking with the media yesterday that last year was an experience his seniors will not soon forget. Nor should they.

"It was really rough for the kids to have to go through the experience they went through last year," he said. "It definitely hardened them. What doesn’t break you definitely makes you stronger and it's made them stronger players, stronger people. It's probably brought us all close together as a group. The new guys don’t quite understand it as much but they definitely feel it and sense it. We didn't feel like we were on equal ground no matter how hard we played. Because of our lack of size, we were up against it."