SEC-Big East Challenge

The SEC–Big East Challenge was an in-season NCAA college basketball series, matching up teams from the Southeastern Conference and the former Big East Conference. The event, which was held each season from 2007 to 2012, has taken place in early December, before the start of conference play.

The original six-year contract for the series expired in 2013 and was not renewed. This was likely an effect of the 2010–13 Big East Conference realignment, in which the full members of the former Big East split up into football-sponsoring (The American) and non-football (new Big East) conferences. The SEC proceeded to establish a new series with the Big 12 Conference called the Big 12/SEC Challenge.

Initially, each annual series included four games featuring four teams from each conference. The games were held as two double-headers in two different, typically off-campus, sites. Though most of the sites are not home arenas for the teams featured in the event, many have been in the same cities as one of the participants. Madison Square Garden in New York City hosted a double-header in 2009 that featured the St. John's Red Storm, who use the Garden as their home arena for some games. In 2010, two games were held at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, which served as the Louisville Cardinals' home arena until the KFC Yum! Center opened for the 2010–11 season. Other venues were occasional home venues for invitational participants. Villanova occasionally plays at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, where they participated in the first year of the Invitational in 2007 (when the venue was known as Wachovia Center). Pittsburgh occasionally hosts games in the Consol Energy Center since it opened in 2010, where they played in the invitational in December of that year.

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