NEW YORK (AP) — Just as anticipated, St. John's and UConn turned the Big East regular season into a two-team race.
Maybe they're headed for one more heavyweight clash when March Madness envelops Madison Square Garden this week.
While the Huskies are a perennial national power with six NCAA titles since 1999, it's Zuby Ejiofor and the Johnnies who have ascended to kings of the neighborhood lately. Fresh off their second consecutive outright conference crown, the 13th-ranked Red Storm are looking to repeat as Big East Tournament champions, too.
“It’s still not over. It’s just beginning," Hall of Fame coach Rick Pitino said. "We have won back-to-back championships with two different teams, and that’s not easy to do. There’s been one common denominator, and that’s the young man to my left (Ejiofor).”
Indeed, the 6-foot-9, 245-pound senior forward is the biggest reason in sneakers that St. John's has scaled such heights the past two seasons.
The team has won 39 of its past 43 games against Big East opponents, including a 3-1 record versus UConn. The rivals didn't meet in last year's tournament dominated by the Red Storm, who sailed through all three rounds by at least 16 points.
This from a program that had gone 32 years without a Big East regular-season championship. And from 2001-23, the Johnnies never even reached the tournament semifinals — with the event held on one of its home courts, no less.
But all that changed with Pitino's arrival. In his third season at the school, the 73-year-old coach brings St. John's (25-6, 18-2) into this Big East Tournament with the top seed for the second year in a row.
“It's awesome," junior guard Dylan Darling said, "because this didn’t start in November. This started back in June, with summer workouts with these guys. And it’s just super fulfilling to know the hard work’s paying off with this group.”
Seeking its fifth Big East Tournament crown, St. John's is 8-1 in three previous appearances as the No. 1 seed. Repeating won't be easy, though.
The last five championships have gone to five separate schools, and no program has earned back-to-back titles since Villanova won three straight from 2017-19. Looming in the bracket is sixth-ranked and second-seeded UConn (27-4, 17-3), which embarrassed the Red Storm in a 72-40 blowout at home Feb. 25 to halt their 13-game winning streak and split the regular-season series.
“It was just our night,” coach Dan Hurley said. “I thought we demoralized them a little bit.”
St. John's took the first meeting 81-72 at a raucous Madison Square Garden on Feb. 6, ending an 18-game win streak for Alex Karaban and the Huskies.
Both teams open Thursday in the quarterfinals against an opponent to be determined. To force a rubber match in the Big East title game Saturday night, each must first win twice this week. And the Huskies will have to shake off a disappointing defeat at Marquette (12-19, 7-13) last weekend, when the hot-tempered Hurley was ejected in the final second of a 68-62 loss that cost them a share of the regular-season crown.
He was fined $25,000 by the Big East for unsportsmanlike conduct.
UConn and St. John's are the only two Big East squads ranked in the AP Top 25 this week, but No. 3 seed Villanova (24-7, 15-5) and fourth-seeded Seton Hall (20-11, 10-10) lead the pack attempting to crash The Garden party.
In their first season under coach Kevin Willard, the resurgent Wildcats are safely in the NCAA Tournament field following a three-year absence. Everyone else besides UConn and St. John's probably needs to run the table in Manhattan, with an automatic bid their remaining hope.
“I’m proud of this group," Willard said. “I think these guys have done a phenomenal job representing this program.”
Paced by electric freshman Nigel James Jr., who will be playing close to his Long Island home, No. 7 seed Marquette closed the regular season flashing stout defense that produced a 22-point win at Providence and the victory over then-No. 4 UConn.
“It’s obviously been a really challenging year for us,” coach Shaka Smart said. "We certainly want to take momentum from this week into the Big East Tournament.”
DePaul (16-15, 8-12) is the No. 6 seed, its highest since joining the Big East for the 2005-06 season.
The tournament begins Wednesday afternoon with a first-round tripleheader. Eighth-seeded Butler (16-15, 7-13) plays No. 9 seed Providence (14-17, 7-13) in the opener. They split two regular-season matchups, with both going to double overtime.
It could be Kim English's final game as Friars coach. Multiple reports citing anonymous sources last week indicated the school informed English he will be fired after the season, his third at Providence.
No. 10 seed Xavier (14-17, 6-14) hoped to have leading scorer Tre Carroll back for Wednesday night's game against Marquette. Carroll, an All-Big East first-team selection, injured his right hip early in a loss to Seton Hall last week and missed Saturday's defeat at Villanova.
“Bad time to have one of the best players in the league get hurt,” said coach Richard Pitino, son of the St. John's boss.
AP Sports Writer Dan Gelston in Villanova, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.
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Villanova guard Tyler Perkins, left, and St. John's guard Oziyah Sellers dive for a loose ball during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/John Munson)
St. John's Red Storm head coach Rick Pitino calls out to his team during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against the Georgetown Hoyas Tuesday, March 3, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
Officials in Kansas City, Missouri, are preparing to equip some public buses with facial recognition cameras capable of detecting whether a passenger appears on a list of banned riders or missing persons.
Supporters and opponents alike view the effort as a major litmus test for tapping the AI-powered software on a U.S. public transportation system, positioning Kansas City as the latest epicenter in a fierce debate over whether the safety benefits of artificial intelligence are worth the privacy costs.
“The idea of running face recognition on a camera that is pointed on live spaces in public is a line that until recently has never really been crossed in the last 25 years,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology at the American Civil Liberties Union.
The state of Missouri declined to help fund the project as expected due to concerns with the facial recognition component. Still, the city is pushing ahead with local and federal money, said Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at the Kansas City Transportation Authority.
“Privacy is always a tricky thing,” Means said. “We’ve always had cameras on our buses. It’s just new technology. I think in time it’ll smooth over and people will realize, ‘Well, it didn’t really feel any different.’”
SafeSpace Global, the Knoxville, Tennessee-based company partnering with Kansas City to run the cameras, started using live facial recognition years ago to alert nursing homes when residents left the building, then brought the technology to correctional institutions and schools. Kansas City’s buses represent the company’s inaugural venture in transportation.
Images captured by cameras aboard the buses would immediately be checked against any active alerts, generated when a missing person, banned rider or someone on a law enforcement watch list designated by the transit authority is identified.
If no match or safety issue is detected, the facial data won't be retained. After the buses return to the depot, the transportation authority would archive the regular video footage on a local server for up to five years.
“It’s not sitting there filming all the time,” SafeSpace Global CEO Scott Boruff said. “It just captures the face and goes away.”
But Stanley with the ACLU warned that it's nearly impossible to limit the scope of a surveillance project when artificial intelligence is involved.
“It may be used for a very narrow watch list today, but there are very good reasons to think it’ll expand over time,” he said.
Backers of the effort point out that security cameras are already found nearly everywhere — even on Kansas City's buses — and some law enforcement agencies have used facial recognition software to identify suspects spotted on video.
Cameras with other types of AI-powered software have been installed in numerous cities on public buses and school buses to read the license plates of nearby vehicles and ticket the ones spotted committing infractions such as illegally parking in a bus lane. Privacy advocates are concerned about those devices as well, but they're particularly alarmed by cameras that could actively record faces even when no crime is committed.
“City residents should not be guinea pigs for transit systems to test Silicon Valley’s latest unproven, biased surveillance tech,” said Will Owen, communications director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, police in Tampa, Florida, used facial recognition cameras in the Ybor City neighborhood to search for crime suspects, but there was immediate backlash and the program was soon abandoned, Stanley said.
More recently, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition surveillance cameras run by a private company despite a city ordinance prohibiting the technology, The Washington Post reported last year. Although the program was believed to have been paused, Stanley wrote a report for the ACLU last month that found it was still operating in some capacity, citing emails an activist obtained through an open records request.
Detroit partnered with some gas stations and liquor stores in 2016 to install high-definition cameras that relayed live feeds of violent crimes directly to the police department. But after a New York Times investigation found footage was paired with facial recognition software to make arrests, some of the accused filed successful lawsuits claiming they were wrongly targeted due to faulty technology that misidentified Black suspects.
James Craig, the police chief at the time, said officials felt the backlash and ultimately changed the rules over how facial recognition could be used without scrapping the program entirely. But he still advocates for the technology, provided it’s done correctly, and says it would be a shame for cities to abandon one of their best tools for securing the streets.
“If the police department or the city doesn’t have the insights to build in strong policies, transparent policies and accountability, the knee jerk reaction is, ‘Well, let’s just ban it,’” Craig said.
The cameras were expected to be installed on Kansas City's buses this spring, but organizers halted the effort just before launch, derailing hopes that they would be up and running in time for the World Cup matches the city began hosting this week.
The delay was partly technical — a need to upgrade Wi-Fi routers to support both the cameras and a new fare collection system on the buses — and partly financial due to state government funding falling through, illustrating the headwinds U.S. cities often encounter when seeking to deploy facial recognition.
Despite the delays, Means said he's confident the program will launch this year and “a little bit bigger” than initially planned, with potentially as many as 30 buses instead of the nine that had been planned under the pilot.
Boruff, the SafeSpace Global CEO, said the company is ready to start installing the Kansas City cameras as soon as the money comes through, although it'll likely take three to four months to configure the software for the city's specific needs.
Ryana Parks-Shaw, a city council member serving as mayor pro tem, said she's not disappointed that the rollout has been delayed.
“I think they need to take their time and do it right,” Parks-Shaw said. “I believe that any use of this kind of technology must be approached carefully, transparently, and with clear guardrails.”
As for securing buses during the World Cup without the facial recognition cameras, Means said the reconfigured plan includes up to 40 more officers patrolling stops and transit centers.
“We're kind of going old school to address what we hoped the technology would do,” he said.
Buses wait for passengers at a transit center Friday, June 5, 2026, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
A bus waits for passengers at a transit center Friday, June 5, 2026, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
People wait for the bus at a transit center Friday, June 5, 2026, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
