Perhaps because we were at Madison Square Garden, the capitol building for Big East basketball, or because some people like crunching numbers more than they should, the backstage conversation during the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic focused on how many NCAA Tournament bids the league might receive. In 2006.

Now, it's not unusual to plan ahead for retirement or for a vacation to the beach, but looking more than two years into the future at something like this requires a special breed. But that's why you're here, right?

So, given that nothing was decided by the coaches, administrators and journalists who debated this at the Garden, let's just start over. With the Big East adding Louisville, Marquette, Cincinnati, DePaul and South Florida for the 2005-06 season, how many teams can a 16-member league place into a championship tournament that includes 65 entrants?

It's a question so tough it should be included on the new SAT. In that spirit, the answers are provided in multiple-choice form.

a) As many as it can earn. The selection committee claims it does not count the number of bids a given league receives annually; instead, it chooses teams on individual qualifications. History indicates the quality of basketball is more important than the size of a league. The Big East had nine members in 1991; seven made the tournament. If 78 percent of a 16-team league gets there, that would be 12 teams. The sport was a little different in 1991, and so was the Big East. That was the most competitive era in its history.

But twice in the past five years, seven of the 11 Big Ten teams were invited. The equivalent in an expanded Big East would be 10 entrants. It would take an extraordinary year for the league to have that many tournament-caliber teams.

Remember, adding incumbent members that made it last year (Pittsburgh, Connecticut, Syracuse, Notre Dame) to those arriving from Conference USA (Louisville, Marquette, Cincinnati) would have given the Big East just seven in the tournament.

b) As many as it can filch. At the major-conference level, at least a small part of the tournament selection process is a con. It's about teams making themselves look their best, or in some cases, better than they are. The four teams that made the NCAAs from the Big East last season played eight true nonconference road games combined. Pitt, UConn, Syracuse and Notre Dame were very good teams, perhaps so good they did not feel compelled to prove it to anyone.

This is why the structure of the future league schedule will be so important. If Big East teams play each league member at least once and just a few teams twice, it will prevent them from bloodying one another. But there's a risk. Such a scheduling structure in Conference USA this season will result in Memphis playing home league games against only two opponents (Louisville and Charlotte) that have made NCAA appearances this decade. That's bad for attendance and bad for a team's tournament profile.

Programs such as Pittsburgh, Connecticut, Syracuse and Cincinnati will be gambling if they continue playing it soft in nonleague games. If one of them gets a home conference schedule that includes mostly Big East bottom-feeders, it will be more difficult to demonstrate tournament-caliber work.

c) As many as it can grab. The field competing for NCAA bids will change considerably by the time the new Big East opens for business. The teams leaving Conference USA Likely will bring along the bids they had been getting there. Cincinnati has been a part of every NCAA Tournament since 1992. Louisville has missed only three times in the past dozen years. Marquette, the only Final Four team Conference USA has produced, is building what could become an elite program.

Without those teams--in addition to Charlotte and Saint Louis, off to the Atlantic 10--the new C-USA will be fortunate if it can squeeze out two bids in a given year. That will leave more bids for everyone else.

d) As many as it wants. One major-conference coach suggests political pressure to accommodate these new large leagues will force the NCAA to open the tournament to all comers. This is proposed almost annually, usually by someone worried about getting left out of the tournament. It's a horrible idea. It would extinguish the vast interest in the NCAA Tournament and render meaningless the regular season. And it's not what CBS paid $6 billion to televise.

We'll give you a little hint here: This is the wrong answer.

After Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech checked out for the ACC, the remaining Big East members decided to stick together. As they moved on to deciding which teams to invite as replacements, commissioner Mike Tranghese warned that a league with 16 members would face unique challenges. One of those is making sure the addition of more teams does not subtract tournament opportunities.

If there still are four or five Big East teams receiving NCAA Tournament bids after expansion, this affiliation won't last long.

(S) Follow the season from the opening tip to the Final Four. Go to www.foxsports.com, keyword: college hoops.

M@IL BONDING

MIKE DeCOURCY ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

When picking a preseason No. 1, a lot of writers pick a team that has a fair chance of winning--but not the favorite. If they pick the favorite and the favorite wins, they gain nothing because that team was supposed to win. But if they pick a team that has a reasonable shot at winning and it does win, then they've got a story.

Mike Bottacari, Deep Creek, Fla.

Mike: I can speak only for the SPORTING NEWS, and we didn't pick Duke over Connecticut as our preseason No. 1 simply to be different. UConn's position as a popular favorite was a factor, but only in the sense that selecting the favorite has been a consistently flawed strategy. The fact that nine of the past 10 Associated Press preseason No. 1 teams failed to win championships helped in our decision.

Our one goal simply is to get the pick right. In the past five years, we were correct three times (Connecticut 1999, Michigan State 2000, Duke 2001), and last season our selection (Kansas) lost by three points in the championship game. We're proud of that record.

E-mail: decourcy@sportingnews.com.

SPEED READS

* Brian Butch's decision to redshirt had a me-first feel to it. Yes, he needs to gain weight and strength. But so did Steve Novak last season, and Novak still helped Marquette to the Final Four as a freshman. Butch, a McDonald's All-American last spring, was good enough to help Wisconsin win the Big Ten now.

* One good sign for St. John's in its opening loss to Marquette was the unveiling of effective zone and half-court trap defenses, which were disruptive because of the Red Storm's quickness. Now, it needs to turn the turnovers it creates into baskets. That's problematic for an offense that has no elite talent in the frontcourt and gifted but erratic Elijah Ingram and Daryll Hill in the backcourt.

* With the early commitment period over, about 90 percent of the top high school prospects have signed letters of intent. Among the last of the top 100 prospects to commit was center David Burgess. After considering Louisville and Gonzaga, he chose BYU, completing one of the Cougars' best recruiting classes in recent memory.

INSIDE DISH

By MIKE DeCOURCY