There are a lot of old sayings about how to compete for regular season titles, the most familiar of which is “Win half of your road games and all of your home games.” The Hoyas already failed to follow that advice. Whether Georgetown wins their third Big East regular season title in a row or not, they would love a bye into the quarterfinals of the Big East Tournament. There is some new advice this year on how to ensure yourself an automatic bid into the quarters at Madison Square Garden: “Don’t lose to a Tuesday team.”

Do you know what a Tuesday Team is? Let me explain. This season, for the first time ever, all 16 teams in the Big East will be playing in the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden. Now, you might think that having a nice square number like 16 would make the tournament easy to figure out. Not quite. If the #1 seed played the #16 seed, that would result in 8 games on the opening day of the tournament. That’s an awfully crowded day of hoops at the Garden. Instead, the Big East Tournament is now a 5-day extravaganza, starting on Tuesday instead of Wednesday like years past. The Tuesday match-ups will feature four games – #9 vs. #16, #10 vs. #15, #11 vs. #14, and #12 vs. #13. If you finish the regular season in the bottom half of the conference, you play on Tuesday. Here’s how this info relates to the Providence game tomorrow.

Providence is currently 3-0 in conference play, but don’t worry about their record – it’s fool’s gold. Providence is a Tuesday team, so the Hoyas have to win if they’re going to fight for the three-peat and/or a bye into the quarters. For Georgetown this season, beating all of the Tuesday teams and splitting all of the other games would give them a record of 13-5, which would be close to the regular season title, and a lock for a 2-day bye. There are about a dozen really good reasons why the Hoyas need to beat the Friars – to get back on track, to stop the bleeding, to regain confidence, blah, blah, blah. This is a mandatory game for the Hoyas to stay in the running for the regular season crown. There is no way that Georgetown can run the table if they lose to Providence, and four losses might only be good enough for second place, like it was last season. So even though it might seem like the Hoyas can beat this team even without an excellent performance, expect JTIII to have the kids locked in from the opening tip. Otherwise, it might be the Hoyas who have to worry about playing on Tuesday.