Brandon Bowman. Jeff Green. John Thompson III.

The 2005-06 Hoyas could be the best team to hit the Hilltop since Allen Iverson called Georgetown home.

And they still might not finish in the Big East’s top five.

This year, what used to be just talk finally becomes a reality. The new Big East is here. And it’s not just different. It’s better.

“This conference is unbelievable,” said Thompson, the Georgetown men’s basketball head coach. “You look at the depth, the quality of the teams from top to bottom.”

The new 16-team league will be long on competition and short on geographic sensibility. No longer is the Big East a league comprised of Atlantic coast powers, thanks to the addition of five former Conference USA teams. Louisville, Cincinnati, Marquette and DePaul will cause the league to span two different time zones now.

The addition of the new teams – South Florida is the fifth – comes three years after Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech were invited to join the Atlantic Coast Conference. With football in mind, the Hurricanes and Hokies left before the 2004-05 season, while the Eagles were forced to wait a year.

Speculation prior to the ACC’s announcement held that Syracuse might be the third team joining Miami and Virginia Tech, but when all was said and done, BC got the call. Conventional wisdom holds that the new conference configurations leave the ACC the stronger football conference, while the Big East has a huge leg up when it comes to hoops.

Of all the newcomers, none is bigger than Louisville, ranked No. 8 nationally in the preseason. Led by Head Coach Rick Pitino, the Cardinals were in the Final Four a year ago, and they are already being picked to be near the top of the league.

Cincinnati, another new kid on the block, may be rebuilding, but a year ago they finished 25-8. And Marquette may not threaten immediately, but who can forget Dwyane Wade suiting up for the Golden Eagles as a member of the 2003 Final Four team?

DePaul, a Jesuit university located in the heart of Chicago, is another school making the jump to the Big East. Though perhaps not a traditional national power, the Blue Demons won 20 games last year.

South Florida has not met the same kind of success as the other Big East newcomers, but the new league should help recruiting, making the Bulls a threat a few years down the line.

The current configuration of the Big East is a far cry from the seven-team league that was formed in 1979. Originally, Syracuse, Connecticut, Boston College, Seton Hall, Providence, St. John’s and Georgetown made up the Big East.

For now, the new Big East is one big 16-team league. There has been talk of two separate divisions – the Big East is doing this in soccer now and tried it out in basketball three years ago – as well as whispers that the league is too powerful to stay together for more than a year or two.

Further rumors hold that the Catholic-affiliated schools in the league – Georgetown, Notre Dame, DePaul, Villanova, arquette, Providence, Seton Hall and St. John’s – may form their own league in the near future.

As it stands now, four teams from the top-heavy conference won’t even make the Big East tournament. A year ago, eight of these 16 teams made the NCAA tournament. To exclude four teams from the postseason conference tournament is in itself a controversial move.

“[It is the] best conference in college basketball,” senior forward Brandon Bowman said. “Every game is going to be a battle.”

For the Hoyas, the implications of the new configuration are numerous. Georgetown will have to contend not only with perennial contenders Connecticut, Syracuse and Notre Dame for league supremacy, but also with the likes of Louisville and Cincinnati.

Due to scheduling constraints, the Hoyas won’t even compete against all 15 other teams. Luckily, Georgetown gets to wait a year to take on Louisville. The Hoyas also don’t face Seton Hall in 2005-06.

Indeed, scheduling is another intricacy of the new league. Thanks to convoluted TV deals, each team in the league will play 10 teams once, three teams twice and two teams not at all.

Forced to pick six teams to give more difficult conference schedules, the league and the TV networks chose No. 2 Connecticut, No. 4 Villanova, No. 8 Louisville, No. 15 West Virginia, No. 16 Syracuse and Cincinnati.

On one hand, choosing these six as the best in the league gives Georgetown an easier schedule. On the other hand, it is just another sign that the nation may not be ready to give the Hoyas the respect that they used to command. In the national preseason coaches’ poll Georgetown is ranked No. 38 with 10 points.

Despite a strong returning core, Georgetown enters the season ranked sixth in the league. Villanova, which may have one of its strongest teams ever, tops the preseason coaches’ poll. Connecticut, even with its unresolved legal troubles, is second.

Rounding out the top five are Louisville, Syracuse and last year’s Cinderella, West Virginia.

The other Big East newcomers fall closer to the bottom of the league. Cincinnati is ranked ninth, DePaul 11th, Marquette 12th and USF last.

According to Thompson, though, the exact rankings mean very little. “It’s a situation where whoever the experts are,” Thompson said. “The teams that are going to be picked to finish in the middle of the league, you would not be surprised if they end up winning.”

To make the NCAA tournament, Georgetown may need to finish higher than they start. Despite the league’s growth, garnering more than five NCAA berths is never an easy task for a conference, although the Big East did have six teams in the tournament last year.

“[With] the depth of the conference, we have to improve for us to take the next step to where we want to be,” Thompson said, but he added that such competition “gets the juices flowing.”

Bowman has high hopes for the league, saying that it is good enough to get more than 10 teams invited to the NCAA tournament.

While that might be shooting a bit too high, Commissioner Mike Tranghese pointed out at the Big East’s media day that the NCAA has changed its policy of not allowing teams from the same conference to face each other until the Sweet 16.

Now conferences foes may be matched up as early as the second round. This should make it easier to accept a record number of teams from the Big East. And theoretically, Conference USA shouldn’t need as many at-large births as it did a year ago.

Even with all the increased competition, only so much importance can be placed on the new league. The only thing Georgetown can truly control is Georgetown.

“If we continue to improve,” Thompson said in a press release, “to do things the right way and get better, where we stand relative to the league and how postseason shapes up, all of that will fall into place.”