Hmmm....Could This Be A BE POY Race After All?

This could end up fairly interesting after all.
It seemed like Notre Dame's Luke Harangody would be the obvious choice for Big East Player of the Year. He's the league's leading scorer, the conference's second-leading rebounder and has the league's best scoring game this year with a 40-point performance against Louisville.
Yet there appears to be some debate on the topic, after all, and it doesn't come from the likes of Connecticut's Hasheem Thabeet, the Huskies' A.J. Price, Georgetown's Roy Hibbert or Marquette's Dominic James.
Nope, it's Louisville's David Padgett.
Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin said earlier this week he'll vote for Padgett as Big East Player of the Year (props to NDNation for finding this before we did). Padgett, by the way, is averaging 12 points and 4.7 rebounds this season as opposed to 21 points and 10.6 rebounds for the Irish sophomore.
The amazing thing is that if Harangody somehow isn't named Player of the Year, he might get shut out of individual awards entirely as he likely won't be named the league's Most Improved Player since it'd be unlikely coaches would vote a player for two awards.
Now, we here at Insights would vote for Harangody for Player of the Year (the media doesn't get to vote) and will in our own postseason awards we'll announce next Monday. It'll be interesting to see what the coaches do.
-By Michael Rothstein of The Journal Gazette