Part 2 of a home-and-home with Friar Basketball's Kevin Farrahar

This is Part 2 of a multi-part Q&A with the incomparable Kevin Farrahar of Friar Basketball. Kevin’s writing and his podcast – cohosted with Billy Ricci – are must reads/listens for any Friars fan. Part 1 of our chat is over at Friar Basketball here, where we talk about the perception of PC and the coaching staff on the recruiting scene as well as the players we’re most intrigued by (and others we might want to pump the brakes on).

Brendon: In the wake of the Big East carnage on Selection Sunday, everyone had an opinion about what the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee did, why the Big East bubble teams – St. John’s, Seton Hall and Providence – were left out and what the league should do next (everything from firing Val Ackerman to calling on national media to investigate exactly how these advanced “resume” metrics work (I admit to supporting the latter).

One of the common themes was that all schools (Big East or otherwise) might want to follow what seems to have been the Big 12 model of weak non-conference scheduling combined with running the score up on overmatched opponents, and even Kim English seemed to imply that the immediate lesson (albeit one after just a few minutes of processing on the night the selections were unveiled) might also be to schedule softer and run it up.

My analysis at the time was that the right lesson was not to schedule weakly and pound teams in the 300s (which is a vast overstatement/oversimplification of what Big 12 schools actually did) but rather to actually do the opposite – schedule aggressively and avoid teams in the 300s, which has been the scheduling consensus prior to last March. If you look at the most unexpected non-Big East team that got left out, you’ll find that (1) it’s Oklahoma, which was in the Big 12; (2) the Sooners had the 320th non-conference strength of schedule per KenPom; and (3) they had no Quad 1 non-conference wins, despite neutral-court victories over Iowa and USC and the home win over PC. So, the Big 12 “strategy” was not useful for the only Big 12 team on the bubble.

All that said, I still think the biggest reason for the Big East snubs was that the league had so many Quad 4 games due to how disgusting DePaul and Georgetown were last season. That was five useless victories for the Friars that actively hurt their resume-based metrics. The best thing the Big East can do to help its bubble teams is to make sure its worst teams aren’t nearly so bad.

And in terms of scheduling philosophy, regardless of what any St. John’s reporters think, the Friars actively pursued a more competitive schedule by replacing a meh MTE at Mohegan with a first-class one in the Battle 4 Atlantis, once Creighton bailed. To me, that was a mix of three things: (1) Coach English knew he needed more high-quality opponents to build an at-large resume; (2) the value to the visibility of the program of being in this event outweighed any risk/downside; and (3) Coach English has a team he thinks can compete in an event with Gonzaga, Arizona, Oklahoma and Indiana.

What do you think? Two-parter for you: (1) What are your thoughts on this staff’s scheduling philosophy – what they have done vs. what they’d ideally like to do? (2) Have DePaul and Georgetown improved significantly this offseason to make those wins anything better than metrics anchors?

Kevin: That’s a loaded two-part question. Let’s start with the Hoyas because … well, it’s fun. Like virtually everyone else in Friartown, I had a laugh at their inability to land a center this offseason, but they got a good one in Julius Halaifonua this week. There’s only so much you can learn from highlights, so I try to watch both the good and the bad of incoming players. After seeing about one hundred possessions between playing in Australia last season and in Adidas games this summer, he looked like a 6-foot-11 Georges Niang. He has terrific touch around the rim, using both hands, possesses advanced post footwork, has a soft fadeaway, and can hit from beyond the arc. There’s a reason why Halaifonua was a top-40 player in the class of 2025 before reclassifying this week. He has a world of talent.

The rest of their offseason I wasn’t as high on. Maybe I just caught him on bad nights, but I wasn’t blown away by Harvard transfer Malik Mack in the three-to-four games I watched. He’s considered a top-10 transfer in the portal this summer by many, but I haven’t seen that. Plus I’m not sure how he and Jayden Epps work defensively – especially without an eraser behind them. Micah Peavy was a good addition, but, at the cost of Dontrez Styles, I’m not sure if it was much of an upgrade, if any at all. Former PC commit Drew Fielder started to come on late last year, but Ed Cooley will be leaning heavily on young bigs in Halaifonua, Fielder, and highly-regarded freshman Thomas Sorber. If the season doesn’t go as planned, expect Cooley to talk about this team’s youth, but is it realistic to keep three underclassmen in Fielder, Sorber, and Halaifonua happy enough to return as a trio in this era? There are some potential swing players in transfers Curtis Williams (Louisville) and Jordan Burks (Kentucky), and I like the two-way ability of incoming frosh Kayvaun Mulready, but I just don’t know if this team has enough outside shooting and interior defense to make much noise in Year 2 of the Cooley era. With that being said, I don’t expect the Hoyas to be quite the anchor on the rest of the league that they were a year ago, which could help the Friars, as you explained.

As for DePaul, I respect Chris Hotlmann enough to assume DePaul will be better, but I’d be lying if I told you I spent much time watching any tape of their overhauled roster at this point of the offseason. Can you save me some time and break down the Demons?

As far as Providence’s schedule, I’m fine with it. Five games they should win followed by three challenges in the Bahamas, and close out with BYU at home, at URI, and a neutral-site against the Bonnies? Your third point on their schedule is a significant one. With the additions they made this spring, I think the staff’s belief is that PC is mature and ready to do more damage in that Atlantis field than those outside of the program think. 

Brendon: My breakdown of DePaul’s roster as part of my 10-part series is coming out Monday, but the tl;dr is that Holtmann completely revamped the roster (not a single minute returns from the worst Big East team of all time) and focused on adding shooting. I am, however, concerned, based on both personnel and recent Holtmann history, about how good (or bad) the defense will be. Holtmann didn’t have a top-60 defense at Ohio State in any of his last four seasons there, and there’s a lot less defensive talent on this roster. I would expect DePaul to struggle to defend the rim and close out defensive possessions with the rebound based on their personnel limitations unless they play two bigs together (perhaps Davidson transfer David Skogman and Missouri State transfer N.J. Benson), which could create issues on offense. From a talent/experience perspective, they are in a tier with Seton Hall and Georgetown, but I prefer Seton Hall of those three due to Holloway’s ability to extract the most from his roster. DePaul’s roster makes more sense to me than Georgetown’s, but I think there is an overall talent gap that the Blue Demons would need to make up via experience and shooting.

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Now, let’s do a full pivot. I’d like to end with something less analytical and maybe a bit more personal. I wanted to know, in all your time following and covering PC basketball, what is your favorite memory – an interview, a game, an event, anything?

I’ll start with a fun one that mixed personal and “professional.” Ed Cooley was in his second season at Providence and the Friars were visiting Rutgers at the RAC. I was covering the game for ScoutFriars.com, but I also had a good buddy who worked in athletics at Rutgers at the time. He set another friend and me up with access to a pre-game spread as well as great tickets. The Friars had a 19-0 run to end the first half, nearly blew it, but held on to win by four behind 22 from Bryce Cotton.

But what made it particularly fun was that I spent 40 minutes rooting for the Friars, got a fist bump from God Shammgod as he left the floor at the final buzzer and then walked back to the RAC press conference room to ask multiple questions to Cooley and Bryce Cotton post-game. Cooley didn’t know me from Adam, and so when I asked about Kris Dunn’s return from injury (he played 34 minutes and had 5 assists to go with four steals that night), he assumed I was a rando and talked me through the history of Dunn’s injuries and recovery as I nodded along. (Those were innocent times, prior to March 2023, but it was wild that I grew up rooting for the Friars and watching Shammgod play, and then here I am covering the team and fist-bumping, well, God.)

But my all-time favorite was the weekend of the 1994 Big East Tournament. I was 12 years old and had school during PC’s quarterfinal win vs. Villanova. My dad – then an administrator at Brown University – asked a student to tape it on the student’s VCR and he got me the tape after school so I could watch it while accompanying my sister who was babysitting. The Friars won easily to setup Saturday’s semifinal with UConn.

That Saturday was one of the great performances by the Friars and one of the great days for a PC fan. It was a beautiful weekend in Rhode Island, and I remember going out during halftime and getting shots up to work out the tension I was experiencing during a taut game. That UConn team was ranked No. 2 nationally – and, in fact, Billy Ricci of Friar basketball recently discussed this game with current Friars assistant Dennis Felton, who was also an assistant under Rick Barnes then. Friar Basketball wrote this game up in 2017 (the full game archive is below), and that game is probably my single favorite win as a Friars fan.

PC capped the weekend in an ugly, uneven win over a non-vintage Georgetown team, but it was the weekend that made me fall in love with the Big East Tournament. I ended up covering four straight tournaments for SNY.tv (those pieces are long since lost to the interwebs) when PC had mostly sad teams in the late 2000s (who else remembers Seton Hall 109, Providence 106?). And now, it’s a tradition that I attend all four games on quarterfinal Thursday as the whole league comes converges on my adopted hometown.

What about you, Kevin? Are there certain games that stick out to you?

Kevin: Let’s never bring up the 109-106 PC/Seton Hall game again. Fair? I DVRed that one, as I planned to cover Friar recruits at the National Prep Championship in New Haven and then head home and watch the PC game later that night or the next morning. I gave in and popped the game on the radio on the way home and I can’t really describe my level of confusion trying to follow along as two teams scored 200 combined in 40 minutes. Greedy Peterson’s 38 points in that game are kind of an unspoken “we don’t really consider that a BET record” stat. 

My fandom is different from many of our readers who grew up in Rhode Island. I loved the Big East as a whole, but didn’t truly become a Friar fan until arriving on campus in the fall of 1997 (following PC’s run to the Elite Eight the prior March). I fell in love with basketball when I watched the 1986 Celtics and fell even harder for college hoops after going to my first Division 1 games in March 1989, which just so happened to be at the Civic Center. It was the second round of the NCAA Tournament and Georgetown (with freshman Alonzo Mourning, sophomore Dikembe Mutombo, and a great senior guard in Charles Smith) had just survived Princeton in the first round. The Hoyas played Notre Dame in a second-round game that made headlines because it featured the top two freshmen bigs in the country in Mourning and LaPhonso Ellis. Obviously, Mourning went on to a Hall-of-Fame career, but Ellis was really good in his own right – the fifth overall pick in a loaded draft (behind Shaq, Mourning, Christian Laettner, and Jimmy Jackson) and just a solid power forward for a long time. Anyway, I got Ellis’ autograph after the game and then saw a double OT thriller between NC State and Iowa, and it all started for me then (ed. aka Brendon note: I have a habit of just finding and watching old college basketball games on YouTube, and I came across that one about five years ago — it was a treat). I was kind of a blanket Big East fan as a kid, cheering for anyone but Boston College. I can’t really pinpoint why I didn’t like BC. I had family members who went there and grew up about half an hour from their campus but never took to them. 

Eric Murdock was the first Friar I truly loved and I desperately wanted the C’s to draft him. A few years later, on my first day on campus as a freshman, Pete Gillen stopped to talk to me and a friend for about 10 minutes outside of Ray (the cafeteria). He answered some hoops questions and assured us we’d love PC. He was so right. Later that year, I went to the Big East Tournament for the first time with my dad (the 1998 BET was wild – I think there may have been four buzzer-beaters) and with each passing year my love for the team has grown.

My favorite games are a mix of the classics (the Texas game, being in North Carolina for Bullock’s buzzer-beater over USC, being there for all of the 2022 NCAA Tournament games in Buffalo and Chicago), but almost as exciting for me were regular-season games in which I felt like the Friars were really onto something. There was a late-season win at a really good Notre Dame team in 2004 when the Friars were surging at the end of February. Ryan Gomes had like 22 and 10 in the second half alone and PC was knocking on the door of a top-10 ranking heading into March. They just seemed to have figured it out on both ends and I thought they could make a push for a Final Four. It may be the only time since ‘97 that I felt like PC had a realistic shot at a Final Four heading into March. Talk about a different time: we couldn’t get the Friars games in Massachusetts, so my college roommate and I watched it from a Chilis in Providence and, essentially ran to our car in the snow to listen to John and Joe on the postgame. In those days, I used to live in Boston, work in New Hampshire, and drove down for every Friar game and then back to Boston that night. It’s nice to be young…

Ultimately, though, my favorite memories are any time I’m at a tournament of some sort and focus on nothing but basketball and sit with fellow Friar fans. I developed lifelong bonds with my friends Jerry, Bill, Ed, and Craig at the prep tournaments at URI; had the time of my life sitting with my wife Anne and a small contingent of PC fans at the Virgin Islands in 2013; Mohegan Sun with college friends is awesome; and in most recent years I’ve loved sitting up in the hockey press box with Billy and my friend Pat. I’m an introvert in every sense, but it’s amazing how quickly walls come down when the game is in front of us.

How about you, those faithful readers who got this far? How did you become a PC fan (or a fan of your favorite team if it’s not PC)? What single game or moment sticks with you years later? Post in the comments!