St. John\u2019s got nearly everything it had hoped for when the Big East released the conference schedule for the 2025-26 season on Thursday afternoon. <\/p>\n
As Newsday first reported, coach Rick Pitino, athletic director Ed Kull and the school administration had pushed to play all 10 Big East home games at Madison Square Garden and was able to schedule nine of them at The World\u2019s Most Famous Arena. <\/p>\n
They\u2019d hoped for the massive spotlight of a Friday night game for the contests against Connecticut and they got one on Feb. 6 at the Garden. The other date with the Huskies currently is scheduled for Feb. 25 in Hartford. <\/p>\n
The annual Dec. 31 game this season will be on the road against Georgetown in Washington, D.C. <\/p>\n
St. John\u2019s, the defending Big East regular-season and tournament champion, will play 12 regular-season games at MSG (plus an exhibition game), matching the 1951-52 team for most games played there when it was in a different location. The nine Big East games at MSG is a record for the Red Storm. <\/p>\n
There might have been an opportunity to get the 10th conference game into the building, but Kull told Newsday that chance was extinguished when St. John\u2019s accepted the invitation to play Kentucky in the Dec. 20 CBS Sports Classic in Atlanta. <\/p>\n
\u201cMSG has been an amazing partner \u2014 all-in,\u201d Kull said. \u201cWe all know the Knicks and Rangers are their highest priority, but they treated us like a priority, too. They wanted every game and were willing to do whatever it takes.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cI played at the Garden my freshman year at Texas . . . and my sophomore year,\u201d Cincinnati transfer Dillon Mitchell said at a team appearance in July. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine putting on the St John\u2019s uniform and playing in front of some fans like that. I\u2019m super-excited to play at MSG.\u201d <\/p>\n
St. John\u2019s Big East opener against DePaul on Dec. 16 will be the lone conference game at Carnesecca Arena. The on-campus home of the Red Storm has undergone seating upgrades that have reduced its capacity from 5,602 by more than 300 seats. It will host the first regular-season game against Quinnipiac on Nov. 3. <\/p>\n
Kull said season-ticket sales have been brisk. Between the more than 8,000 that have been sold and the student sections, the Garden\u2019s entire lower bowl is sold out. He added that the release of the full schedule could spark additional season-ticket sales. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere have been a lot of inquiries from people who wanted to know when the full schedule would be out,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
The Red Storm already were\u00a0playing a very \u00a0ambitious non-conference schedule with Garden games against Alabama (Nov. 8) and Ole Miss (Dec. 6), Players Era Tournament games against Iowa State, Baylor and a third opponent to be determined (Nov. 24-26) and Kentucky in Atlanta. <\/p>\n
The conference schedule has a couple of measuring-stick stretches \u2014 one in mid-January and another in late February. <\/p>\n
In the eight days from Jan. 10-17, St. John\u2019s has road games against Creighton and Villanova around a home game with Marquette. In\u00a0the 12 days from Feb. 14-25, it has road games at Providence, Marquette and UConn broken up with a home game against Marquette. <\/p>\n
St. John\u2019s finishes the regular season with three of its less challenging games: Villanova at the Garden (Feb. 28), Georgetown at the Garden (March 3) and on the road at Seton Hall on\u00a0March 6. <\/p>\n
Start times for the Big East games have not been announced. <\/p>\n
St. John\u2019s will play two exhibition games before the regular-season opener against Quinnipiac. It will host\u00a0Towson at Carnesecca Arena on Oct. 18 at 2 p.m. and meet\u00a0Michigan at the Garden at 7 p.m. on Oct. 25. Kull said there is a possibility\u00a0that the Michigan exhibition, a possible matchup of Top 10 teams, will be televised.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n\tRoger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. John\u2019s got nearly everything it had hoped for when the Big East released the conference schedule for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,1976,4044,398,400,401,99,10151],"class_list":["post-150267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-college","tag-college-basketball","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaabasketball","tag-sports","tag-st-johns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}