NCAA Basketball: TCU’s struggles, Maui breakdown among biggest takeaways
By Joey Loose
8. Can we trust the Big Ten?
It’s a broken record at this point but we’ll say it again: a team from the Big Ten has not won the national championship since Michigan State way back in 2000. The preseason poll had just three Big Ten teams in the Top 25, and none of them in the top 10. One of those teams has already fallen out of the polls. However, the conference looks stronger than we expected two-plus weeks into the season.
We’ll give a run through and brief breakdown on some of these teams, but it’s not just one or two teams carrying things at the moment. Six schools are in KenPom’s top 25 and eleven are in the top 45. Even some of those lower schools have had decent play in the opening weeks of the season.
Michigan State has already beaten Kentucky and Villanova and nearly upset Gonzaga. Indiana won at Xavier while Illinois got a great win against UCLA in Las Vegas. Teams like Iowa and Maryland have had really nice starts to their seasons, while Ohio State and Purdue have looked solid as well, even if the Buckeyes lost their opening game in Maui. Even Michigan has had bright moments, ignoring a big loss to Arizona State last week.
Our point isn’t to say that the Big Ten looks better than expected, because they clearly do to this point. The point is to wonder if this all means anything. There are prominent players in the conference like Trayce Jackson-Davis at Indiana and Hunter Dickinson at Michigan, but it’s hard to say that any of these teams compares to some of the elite teams currently in the country. You could see one of these teams potentially going on a run in March Madness, but it’s far too early to know exactly what to expect.
One thing that’s for sure is the Big Ten will be quite the fight to the finish, with Indiana and Michigan State certainly looking like the cream of the crop early on.