When Marquette defeated Villanova by the score of 81-77 on New Year's Day, the loss dropped the Wildcats to 0-2 in the Big East and 7-7 overall. It confirmed what people were probably thinking already: Jay Wright's team is in a lot of trouble this season.

Since then, they've had their ups and downs in the standings. Villanova currently sits at 10-11 overall with a conference record of 3-6. We all know what Marquette's been doing in the meantime. Let's check in before tomorrow's game and see how the last 7 games have treated Villanova.

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Tonight brings my favorite non-Marquette related game of the college basketball season: the annual matchup between former Marquette coach and current world leader in unwarranted smugness, Smarmy Tom Crean, and his Indiana Hoosiers and the undead scourge of up-tempo-loving basketball fans everywhere, Bo Ryan, and his Wisconsin Badgers.

If you've followed Anonymous Eagle for any appreciable amount of time, you know that I hold Coach Crean and Coach Ryan in unparalleled esteem. If you said to me: "Rubie, you can have dinner with any four people in the world," Coach Crean and Coach Ryan would be my third and fourth selections (after Burt Reynolds, of course).

The fact of the matter is: for all the grief I give STC and Bo, these two titans are the best face-makers in college basketball -- from hysterical reactions to foul calls to hysterical reactions to non-foul calls, Coach Crean and Coach Ryan are facial contortionists without equal.

Don't believe me? Let's go to the tape and check it out:

(Relatedly: the Burr'd Face doubles as "We Broke 30 Before Halftime in a B1G Conference Game? BU- WHA- HUH?" Face.)

After the jump: more fun with facial tics.

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I'll admit I haven't read much of Tom Enlund's work in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this season. Between being able to watch most of the games and listening to the podcasts that the athletic department puts up from Buzz's post game press conferences, I don't have much desire to track down a newspaper and read what's in it about Marquette. But yesterday, I came across a copy of the sports section and thought I'd check out what Enlund wrote about the South Florida game.

And then I got four paragraphs in.

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I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again by the end of the season a few more times: The Big East Conference has stopped making sense.

There used to be a reasonable amount of logic to the season. Teams everyone expected to be good would be good and win games they were supposed to win. Occasionally you'd get a team flare up and be better than expected, but once you figured out they were pretty good, they followed the model of winning games they were supposed to.

That's all out the door this year. Down is up, right is left, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

We had 5 Big East games last night. Only one of them made sense, and based on how this season has been going, it didn't even make that much sense.

Hit the jump, and we'll get into this.

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Forty good minutes. Two good halves. A solid performance on both ends of the floor. One complete game.

That's what Marquette fans, coaches, and players have been looking for over the past few weeks. Frustrated by inconsistency, lost leads, slow starts and simple lapses in the last several games, people have been waiting for the game when the Golden Eagles would put it all together. Well kids, it is with great pleasure that I am here to say that Tuesday's game against the South Florida Bulls was that game.

Marquette came out looking to establish the big man right away. They fed the ball to Davante Gardner on each of their first few trips down the floor, and Big Smooth delivered by scoring the Golden Eagles' first 6 points of the game. But despite Davante's efforts, South Florida was able to hit just enough jumpers to hang around in the early going.

With 4 minutes to play in the half it was an 18-15 game, and it appeared that USF was going to extend their streak of 16 straight games of holding their opponent under 30 points in the first half. But a 3-pointer by Darius Johnson-Odom sparked a late surge that would put Marquette in the driver seat. A Jamil Wilson 3-pointer, a pair of Todd Mayo free throws, and a tip dunk by Wilson as the horn sounded gave MU a 7-0 spurt over the last minute of the half and a 33-21 lead.

The momentum of that little run, and the baskets that preceded it, carried over into the second half. In the first 1:30 of the half, Jae Crowder hit a deuce, Davante made a free throw, and DJO drained a triple to extend the Marquette advantage to 39-22 and prompt Stan Heath to call a timeout to try and stop the bleeding. But Stan's talk did little to turn the tide. Missed shots and turnovers by USF led to run-outs and baskets for Marquette. The Bulls would never draw closer than 15 the rest of the way, the Blue and Gold cruised to victory 67-47.

Bullet points and awards after the jump

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