
Guys don't get carried off the floor on people's shoulders much these days. 43 points will do that.
Any recent fan of Big Ten athletics is undoubtedly familiar with the senseless pap that gets thrown around in the name of the conference. Something about the rust-belt Midwestern sprawl of the conference prompts senseless talking-heads to ascribe a slew of blue-collar sensibilities to the style of play in THE BIG TEN CONFERENCE (this should be said in your best Merrill Hoge “NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE” voice). The assertion is that the physical, brawny Big Ten will dissemble any newfangled wrinkle of innovation. Lately, in football, this has been a sop – the conference is down, not just compared to it’s SEC rivals, and it seems like a minimum level of competence in any scheme (TACKLING works in the BIG TEN CONFERENCE) is enough to warrant success. Further, it’s often a lie – the image of the conference is between the tackles old-school football which really only applied to Wisconsin this past year.
In basketball, however, this is close to law – the conference DOES play slower, it DOES play more physical (witness a “soft team like Michigan’s recent win over MSU for an example) and it DOES punish teams that can’t match these qualities (see: Northwestern’s significant difficulties in taking down more than one good team a year). What worse is that for the past few years, the conference has been brutally deep, with teams from the top echelon struggling to win on the road, anywhere.
Last week, the Big Ten had four teams ranked in the top 25, and every single team dropped a road game to an unranked opponent. Three of these losses came to Iowa, Nebraska, and Northwestern, and the combined conference record of the victors was an uninspiring 11-14. These games have been unforgiving, and it’s not just because the favorite plays poorly: Ohio State lost a game that saw them take 21 more shots than Illinois, Indiana out-shot Nebraska by 14 percentage points, and Michigan State posted their best eFG% of Big 10 play against Northwestern. The opposition has just found ways to win – from Illinois conference-worst shooting team hitting 60% from the floor, Nebraska’s 275th ranked offensive rebounding attacking winning the battle on the boards, and Northwestern’s porous defense forced turnovers on 25% of the Spartans possessions. It’s just a jungle out there.
What does it mean going forward? Since going to an 18-game conference slate, the conference has been won by a team that goes 15-3 or better in three of four years, with the lone exception being 2010, when three times tied at 14-4 and a fourth finished at 13-5 – the most top-heavy performance in league history. With every favorite sitting with at least two conference losses a mere third of the way through the season, this figures to be the lowest win figure to take the conference since the expanded conference slate. Illinois sits at the top with one loss, but with two to play against both Wisconsin and Michigan, road-trips to Indiana and Ohio State, and a game against Michigan State, some losses are coming. The bet here is that you see the conference’s first 13-win champion since the expanded conference slate.
Onto the power-rankings: Read more »



