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Maybe Tom Izzo said it best in January 2020. After being bullied in an unbalanced loss at Purdue the same weekend, four Big Ten ranked teams took to the road and took off. Lost to unranked teams, the Michigan State coach collapsed on a table in Mackey Arena and moaned, as only he can, “Our league is the worst because our league is the best. “
As it was then, and as it still is today, it is the bitter pill of the Big Ten. The overall strength of the league allows its participants to spend the whole year telling you this is the best conference in the country. And you believe them because the numbers generally agree. Last year’s regular season ended with the Big Ten producing an adjusted conference efficiency rating of +20.90, easily making it the best conference in KenPom.com history (2002 -present), a crown she took at ACC 2004 (+20.32). The Big Ten entered the playoffs with six of the nation’s top 13 teams, according to KenPom, and produced a league record with nine teams in the NCAA tournament, including two No.1 seeds.
Then there is the flip side. Reality. All of these claims of being the best and the best that are starting to fall on deaf ears as the conference does nothing in March. Last year’s sad NCAA tournament seemed statistically impossible. Almost a quarter of the tournament’s first round games featured Big Ten teams. Only one, Michigan, qualified for the Sweet 16. The conference was the fifth to send nine or more teams to the NCAA tournament. In three of the previous four cases, at least one team qualified for the Final Four, and those years produced two national champions. Last year’s Big Ten was completed at the end of the Elite Eight.
And so, the league title drought, which dates back to Izzo’s squad in 2000, continues.
Yet here we are prepared to say that the Big Ten is once again possibly America’s toughest top-down conference.
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