Big Ten Basketball: Each team’s worst performance of the last decade

Big Ten basketball hasn’t fielded a champion in 18 years and there’s been a lot of hardship during that time. What was each team’s worst single game performance of the last ten years?

Every single college basketball teams has high points and low points during each season. For some teams those high points are much higher than others, but it’s also true that those low points can be catastrophically lower as well. While it’s always promising to think about the good moments, let’s take a few moments to consider the bad.

As we near the beginning of the 2018-19 season, we’re just going to take a moment to look at the worst game performances of the last decade for each team, with today’s focus on the Big Ten. For clarity, these are games that take place between November 2008 and April 2018, not including games from the second half of the 2007-08 season.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, just a little understanding about what constitutes a team worst performance. There’s no hard and fast rule that will apply to every team, and different criteria will be considered for different teams. Worst performance doesn’t always mean the most devastating loss; I did not automatically choose NCAA Tournament losses even if they ended a team’s season. Games were selected based on a team’s overall performance, which favored poor performances against bad teams, even if they were in November or were inconsequential to the season as a whole.

For many teams, a number of games were considered and several are mentioned during each team’s part of the article. This list represents my own opinions, though I narrowed down many of the selections based on Bart Torvik game scores, which are included as (GS: ?) next to each game’s final score.. The final selections were mine and mine alone are simply one representation of some of the worst of each of these teams.

This is the third part of this series, and the worst games for the ACC and SEC and Pac-12 have already been posted.

Without further ado, let’s run through the Big Ten and look at the worst of the worst for each of the teams.