Can Other Brothers Stop 1A and 1B in Big East? : Basketball: Georgetown and Syracuse are evenly matched and Dick Vitale says either one could win national championship.

Georgetown and Syracuse. Syracuse and Georgetown. Who can catch a break with these guys around?

Dick Vitale, prominent sage, ESPN broadcaster and sorter-out of the national college basketball powers, calls them “1A and 1B in the Big East Conference. In players, one to 12, Syracuse is the most talented team in the country. But these are great teams and either one could win the national championship.”

Everybody doesn’t like Vitale’s television style, but his basketball knowledge seldom is called into question.

But next time, ask him a tough one, will you? You don’t have to be a walking, fast-talking vault of knowledge to draw the same conclusions. You need know only that basketball is round in shape and orange in color. This season is no different than most others. The nine coaches of the Big East Conference, which is very big and mostly east, voted Georgetown first (or 1A if you prefer) and Syracuse second (1B) in the annual exercise in appealing nonsense, the preseason poll.

“There is a clear demarcation between those two (the Hoyas and Orangemen) and the others,” agreed Coach Jim Calhoun of the University of Connecticut.

So what’s new? But just for fun and exercise, not to mention money, they’re going to play the season anyway, remembering that one of the seven Others Brothers, Seton Hall, made the Final Two last year.

Is this not the way things go down every November when the conference holds its elaborate kickoff news conference in two large rooms at the Grand Hyatt? Of course. It happens so often that Coach John Thompson of Georgetown says he expects it and accepts it and “we do take pride in it.”

As always, Thompson and Coach Jim Boeheim of Syracuse sat at their tables with the largest contingents of writers and broadcasters bunching in front of them, straining to hear them remind people they are just as vulnerable as the next team. They speak softly (on purpose, I think; why can’t they yell, like Vitale?), answering the same questions for first one congested clot of newsmen and then the next.

Occasionally, they’ll tell you something you suspected, but didn’t know for sure.

This from Thompson, for example: “Dwayne Bryant and Mark Tillmon are the best combination of two guards that have ever played for Georgetown. They are quick, strong, alert, effective. As good as any I’ve ever had.”

That says plenty. John Thompson has had so many great backcourters you couldn’t fit all their names on the back of a Big East poster in fine print. But he’s also a man who weighs his words carefully when speaking publicly about his team, especially in the preseason. Hey, maybe he wants the two seniors to read the papers before the shooting starts. Maybe he hopes they’ll see in print that he’s counting on them not only for scoring and dishing and directing on the floor, but for the kind of leadership that is rewarded in championships.

It is his two mammoth sophomores, Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo, who get most of the attention when the name Georgetown comes up, and it always comes up in the same breath as the term college basketball. Mourning and Mutombo comprise 14 feet (exactly, if laid end to end) of mountainous talent. No player in the nation got more publicity per inch than Mourning last year. Only 18, he seemed to thrive on it. Few freshmen would have handled it as well.

“He is mature,” Thompson agreed, “but I think there are a lot of things he’s got to learn. But I think Alonzo presents himself differently in a lot of ways. . . . I don’t think he’s as mature in some ways as he gives the air of being and that’s good. I would worry about him if he came right out of high school and knew everything and was as composed as a senior.”

So the old guards will guard the kids against the snares and snafus that often entrap the young.

“Charlie Smith was a good leader,” Tillmon noted later, addressing the responsibilities of leadership. “By his actions on the court--not verbally. You do your talking in practice. That’s what it’s for. This is no big ego thing for us, and we don’t worry about what people say in the preseason. All that matters is what happens in the end. Look at Seton Hall last year.”

“I think people step up and adjust,” Thompson said. “Charlie Smith (last season’s Big East player of the year) was not always a dominant point guard. In fact, he was a substitute who played very little at one time. Dwayne Bryant and Mark Tillmon’s time has come.”

Across the room, the coach of 1B was speaking about his most exciting and interesting player, senior Steve Thompson. Thompson, who is 6-foot-4, played off-guard and forward last year and this season is slated to be the point guard for the Orange. With Thompson on the outside looking in, and the brilliant big man Derrick Coleman on the inside looking out, the Others Brothers know they had better look out or they’ll all be looking up into an orange-colored sky at Syracuse.

Boston College Coach Jim O’Brien is not unhappy to see Thompson moving away from the target area. “Thompson does most of his damage around the hoop, so I like to see him in the backcourt,” O’Brien said.

Boeheim countered, “Stevie will wind up doing what he always does. When you’re on the wing, you only get so many opportunities. In the backcourt, he can do more. He’s the hardest working player I’ve ever had. Spends an extra hour and one half to two hours every day working on his ball handling and shooting. And he’s the strongest man on the team. He can bench press more than anyone else. I believe Thompson is one of the best-kept secrets in the country.”

Not to the Others Brothers he isn’t; not in what may be the nation’s strongest conference in 1989-90.

Or is the Big East the Best of the Big?

Back to Vitale. “I think the Big Ten is the best league only because there are more teams in the Big Ten with the potential to win it all,” he said. “And here I am at the Big East press conference saying that..”