Honestly minus MSU falling way below expectations to this point those seem pretty accurate from preseason prognostications. We had what seemed like a preseason consensus top 4, a whole mess of teams in the middle, and then NW and Nebraska below everyone else. NW jumping up a tier and a division among that mess in the middle don’t seem too shocking. MSU dropping that far is the only thing that really would have shocked me preseason.
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Until I am proven otherwise(and I can’t believe I’m going to say this), I think NW is in the 2nd tier right now and Rutgers should be in T1(especially when they are healthy). NW is a very good looking team right now.
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That’d be my only comment as well. Credit due to NW there.
FWIW, the ESPN Power Rankings (top 16) on Monday morning:
8. Wisconsin
11. Iowa
14. Rutgers
15. Minnesota (this is before MSU win)
16. Northwestern
“In the Waiting Room”
Ohio State
I felt at the time this was a pretty big slight to Illinois, and a lesser extent to UM. Caveat that I don’t actually care about rankings…but interesting to see national perspective differ from ours.
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Seems absurd to have Illinois below Minnesota and Northwestern
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That list is terrible, even understanding it’s a power ranking so he can do whatever he wants I guess
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Too early for this but … for discussion’s sake…
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Along the same line of thinking RE: Michigan’s strength of schedule, Wisconsin has played three of the bottom five teams and the two worst.
Those efficiency splits for MSU are startling
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Yeah, when it is this early. The teams at the top almost had to play against the teams at the bottom mathematically.
That makes sense. Illinois’ performance to date stands out both numerically but also with schedule. Two of their four against teams in the top half, really impressive.
And the thing about MSU is that we’ve just learned to assume that Izzo will pull a rabbit out a hat. They were heavily reliant on Winston and Tillman last year and it seemed like it’d be really hard to replace them “but they always do”.
Yep. They sort of reiterate that Michigan State hasn’t lost games it has been really bad and lost games. It’s one thing to lose a few close games, another thing to play that badly over a 3-game stretch.
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MSU hadn’t played a B1G basketball game without Cassius Winston since the '15/'16 season, and it appears they had no one remotely suitable to take over for him. They could have used an experienced transfer point guard like Mike Smith this year. Izzo will instead have to make this work with weird guys and peculiar folk.
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Izzo did try to get a transfer and was hard after Karim Mane but came up empty… too bad
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Yes, it’s a terrible shame.
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I always thought Izzo lucked into the tandem of Winston/Tillman the past 2 years. I want to say Winston’s Sophomore year was underwhelming with Bridges returning to school. Felt like the MSU teams for years were not efficient in half-court offense prior to the past 2.
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I don’t think you luck into winning three Big Ten titles in a row. One, maybe. Three, nope.
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Winston had a 129.2 ORTG on 22.9 USG his sophomore year. He was not underwhelming, he was underutilized.
Maybe what you’re trying to say is that Izzo took far too long to realize his best offense was to run ball screens with that duo instead of post ups. Once they did, they were lethal. I think that’s the issue right now is that they don’t have one thing on offense that they trust.
I think they need to embrace Hauser as the five with post ups and pick-and-pop. But I am not sure who is good at initiating those ball screens.
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