"I think it's a play-in game for the NCAA tournament," Wright said in response to a question. "I don't think it gets any bigger or better than this."

Wright tempered his remarks later Monday when he met with the Philadelphia-area media at the Davis Center. But he is perfectly clear on the focus of today's conference tournament opener at New York's Madison Square Garden:

The loser will be eliminated from NCAA tournament consideration.

"If we're going to get to the tournament, we've got to beat a tournament team, and I think [Syracuse] is a tournament team," Wright said. "We've got to go up there and prove it.

"We always talk about the next game is the biggest game. You want to win the Big East tournament, but if you don't win the first game, you can't do it. That's one of the things we really try to teach these guys. I think this group has picked up on that a little bit."

His players, however, do watch television, and all the talk in college basketball is what the tournament brackets will look like come Sunday evening. A few people have the Wildcats in if they win today. Some think they need to beat regular-season champion Georgetown in a potential second-round matchup tomorrow.

Whatever the players are thinking, though, they are keeping it locked up inside.

"There's a lot of good teams and a lot of good conferences," sophomore guard Scottie Reynolds said. "You could make a case for the Big East to have a lot more teams than they might put in. But we can't control any of that. We can only control how we play and how we go out there Wednesday."

"We don't want to put too much pressure on ourselves," junior forward Dwayne Anderson added. "So we're just going to tell the young guys to stay calm, that it's just another game for us and do what we've been doing - play hard, defend and rebound."

Calm may be an easy word to say, but today, with a sellout crowd of more than 19,000 expected to be in the seats for the noon tip-off, staying calm will be a different story. The key probably will be which team's freshmen can better handle the spotlight.

For Villanova (19-11), that means the quartet of Corey Fisher, Corey Stokes, Antonio Pena and Malcolm Grant and how they fare against the four rookies in Syracuse's rotation - Jonny Flynn, Donte Greene, and former Neumann-Goretti High teammates Scoop Jardine and Rick Jackson. Fisher, Flynn and Greene made the conference's all-rookie team.

"I have no clue what's going to happen," Wright said.

Syracuse (19-12), which picked up an 87-73 victory over Villanova on Feb. 2 at the Wachovia Center to split the season series with the Wildcats, is ranked 46th in the RPI, according to collegerpi.com, 10 spots ahead of 'Nova.

The Orange have a strength-of-schedule ranking of No. 7, compared with 56 for Villanova. But they are 4-5 in their last nine games, while the Wildcats are 6-3.

What the committee will consider more significant when making its choices is anyone's guess. One keenly interested guy is Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, who was critical of the committee last year after his Orange failed to get in with a 24-11 mark.

When asked about the impact of today's game on the NCAA Tournament, Boeheim was noncommittal.

"I have no thoughts on that," he said. "We're getting ready to play and do the best we can. We're playing a very difficult team, and we're going to play as well as we can. There's nothing we can do about anything else."

But the speculation on whether the work of Villanova or Syracuse regarding the NCAA tournament is done with a win today will rage on. It's the beauty of March Madness.