Baye Keita #12 of the Syracuse Orange celebrates after Syracuse won 58-55 in overtime against the Georgetown Hoyas. (Photo by Chris Chambers/Getty Images)

No. 19 Syracuse outlasted No. 5 Georgetown, 58-55, in overtime in the final Big East meeting between the two rivals on Friday night. Syracuse will advance to play for a Big East championship before leaving for the ACC next season.

Baye Keita scored 13 points off the bench for the Orange to go along with eight rebounds and a block.

Michael Carter-Williams missed a jumper at the end of regulation for Syracuse as the two Big East rivals went into overtime at Madison Square Garden.

Syracuse outscored the Hoyas 7-4 in the final period to advance to the Big East final. The Orange will play the winner between Notre Dame and Louisville. 

The Big East Conference’s seven basketball Catholic schools will announce in the next week to 10 days other members of the conference, reports ESPN.com.

The league’s members, DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, Seton Hall, St. John’s and Villanova are set to start the new league July 1. The postseason tournament will be held at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The athletic directors of those schools met in New York on Wednesday and said that the league’s presidents told them that a search firm has been hired to find a new commissioner.

Additional members have not yet been invited, so naming any set teams is premature, although the favorites remain Xavier and Butler out of the Atlantic 10 and Creighton out of the Missouri Valley. Dayton and Saint Louis also are candidates from the A-10, with Richmond probably a long shot.

The Gonzaga Bulldogs clinch WCC crown after beating Portland on March 2, 2013. (Photo by William Mancebo/Getty Images)

For the first time in school history, the Gonzaga Bulldogs are atop the AP Top 25 college basketball rankings.

Gonzaga, winners of their last 12 contests, received 29 first-place votes to unseat Indiana as the number one team in the country. The Bulldogs come off a convincing win over Portland, 81-52, to clinch the regular season crown in the West Coast Conference. Gonzaga will enter not only as the No. 1 seed in the West Coast Conference tournament but as the top team in the nation.

Former number one, Indiana, drops down a spot followed by Duke, Kansas and Georgetown to round out the top five.

Gonzaga finished a perfect 16-0 in West Coast Conference play and 29-2 overall. Gonzaga will play in the WCC conference semifinal on March 9th.

The Big East hopes to resolve the details of its split over the next few weeks so that the seven departing Catholic-based schools can leave by the summer of 2014, ESPN.com’s Andy Katz is reporting.

League members discussed the matter during a conference call on Friday, when “there seemed to be a consensus” that each of the seven schools — Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Marquette, DePaul and Villanova — want to form a new league by the fall of 2014, according to the report.

There was “very little talk of expansion” during the call, which centered mainly around the split and a new TV contract, the report states.

Matters still to be determined include the “legal battle” over the Big East name and the departing seven schools’ decision on a new commissioner, league bylaws, location, championships, compliance rules and the addition of new teams.

The departing seven are expected initially to target Butler and Xavier out of the Atlantic 10 to get to nine teams. The next question will be if the seven grow to 10 or 12 with candidates among Creighton, Dayton, Saint Louis, Richmond and VCU.

The remaining Big East schools in 2014-15 would consist of UConn, Cincinnati, South Florida, Memphis, Temple, SMU, Houston, Central Florida, Tulane and East Carolina for football, and then Navy in the fall of 2015.

UCLA transfer Josh Smith averaged 5.2 points and 4.2 rebounds in six games this season. (Harry How/Getty Images)

6-foot-10, 300-plus-pound UCLA transfer Josh Smith is headed to Georgetown, CBSSports.com’s Jeff Goodman is reporting. The junior chose the Hoyas over Kansas, according to the report.

Smith, who arrived at UCLA as a blue-chip recruit and first-round NBA prospect, has struggled to keep his weight down in college. He averaged 10.9 points and 6.3 rebounds per game in 21.7 minutes a freshman, but those numbers dropped to 9.9, 4.9 and 17.2 during his sophomore year.

Smith played in six games for the Bruins this season, averaging 5.2 points and 4.2 rebounds in just 13.5 minutes per game before announcing that he would transfer in late November.

UCLA has gone 8-4 in his absence, including most recently an upset over No. 7 Missouri. Georgetown is 10-1 this season and currently ranked No. 15.

Yahoo! Sports Jeff Eisenberg tweeted that the move is a “worthy gamble” for the Hoyas, who have a storied tradition of building around big men, including Patrick Ewing, Dikembe Mutombo, Roy Hibbert and Greg Monroe.

I think Josh Smith is well worth a gamble for Georgetown. Obviously a very talented kid. Maybe JTIII will have more success motivating him.—
Jeff Eisenberg (@JeffEisenberg) January 02, 2013

The Georgetown men’s basketball team believes that the unfortunate pre-season fight they had with a Chinese professional team during an 11-day tour of China helped bring them together, according to The New York Times.

“We decided right then, from that point on, we would have each other’s backs,” guard Jason Clark told The Times. “That was the point where this team really started to come together.”

The Hoyas and a professional Chinese team, the Bayi Rockets, whose players are selected from the People’s Liberation Army, were tied at 64-64 before a brawl broke out between the two last summer. The fight sparked international news, and videos of the brawl went viral online.

“It was a very physical game,” guard Markel Starks told the Times. “And then it got out of hand.”

The Hoyas, ranked No. 13 overall in the nation, were picked to finish 10^th in the Beg East preseason coaches poll.