Extreme Makeover: Garden Edition

Now with youngest team in school history, Steve Lavin and St. John's will return to Holiday Festival this season in the tournament's new one-day format on December 17th at Madison Square Garden. (Photo courtesy of New York Daily News)

It's just not a college basketball season unless the Holiday Festival is headlined by the St. John's Red Storm inside the venerable confines of Madison Square Garden. Fortunately for college basketball purists and old-school fans, history will once again be repeating itself as the boys from Queens will take their talents to midtown Manhattan in what will be the second trip to the Garden for the youngest squad in program history, with most of these players making their debuts inside the home of the New York Knicks one month prior as part of the culmination of the 2K Sports Classic, an event that will also include Arizona, Mississippi State and Texas A&M.

Following a two-day confluence in which Steve Lavin's NCAA Tournament participants first disposed of Davidson in a hard-fought nonconference matchup before using a second half in which they shot 80 percent from the field to handily upend Northwestern to claim the tournament crown, the reigning Holiday Festival champion Johnnies will take the court at "The World's Most Famous Arena" against Fordham University on December 17th looking to erase the memory of a shocking upset loss that ironically ended up being the turning point of last season's miraculous run. Rutgers will face Stony Brook in the other game of the Garden doubleheader on the 17th, but there will be no consolation or championship game the following day as there was in years past. As tweeted earlier today by college basketball insider Jon Rothstein, the Holiday Festival will now be a one-day event as opposed to the tournament-style affair it had earned its name and reputation as.

On the positive side of this one-day format, it will give all four schools the opportunity to play a game at Madison Square Garden and avoid the embarrassment of losing both contests that has been felt by programs such as Columbia and St. Francis in recent incarnations of the Holiday Festival. However, the ability for teams to say they were fortunate enough to play two games inside one of the most recognizable venues in the world has been taken away. In addition, a traditional Holiday Festival setup could have potentially provided an intriguing matchup between St. John's and Rutgers before the two teams would have collided in a Big East matchup in Piscataway. Adding to the fire would be the fact that the Red Storm and Scarlet Knights would be facing each other for the first time since the controversial ending to their Big East tournament meeting last March, one where Justin Brownlee appeared to step out of bounds and travel while throwing the ball into the crowd in a sequence that was ignored by the officials and subsequently criticized as a result.

Even though the Holiday Festival is no longer a conventional tournament, one thing remains the same: All four programs will still get the opportunity to show their stuff to the Madison Square Garden crowd. Four local schools inside the Mecca of basketball eight days before Christmas. It simply doesn't get much better than this for the rabid college basketball fans out there.