Playing 6 games in 12 days is tiring. Playing tired leads to injuries. Injuries lead to poorer play. I don’t see how that’s hard to see.
I didn’t say I think it is primarily responsible for the B10 title drought, but if the B10 does ask teams to do that more than other conferences (I don’t know that’s true or not), it is at least something that lowers the odds by some percent. If one of the say 5 teams the conference has produced that could win the title gets hamstrung by a stress fracture, that seems like a rather large % discount right? Especially when one (1) win ends the drought.
Like, I think most of us think that Michigan team was capable of a title at full strength, right?
There’s never going to a case where we are 100% sure why a guy got injured.
Also Charles Matthews, who played but was greatly diminished
“… and the Big Ten’s scheduling has caused its NCAA title drought.”
I need more than the Isaiah Livers injury to give that statement credibility.
-Was the injury caused by how the Big Ten schedules? Maybe, maybe not.
-Would Livers have gotten the stress fracture with different schedule? Maybe, maybe not.
-Would Michigan have won the tournament with Livers? Maybe, maybe not.
It’s still a huge reach to have that be the main support behind a statement of “… and the Big Ten’s scheduling has caused its NCAA title drought.”
Purdue mightve won the Hummel year, too. But Hummel was injured after Big East type Wed-Sat-Wed-Sat scheduling. Talk about a glitch in the matrix. How can we shape that to fit the narrative?
Villanova clearly would have won the national title last season if Justin Moore didn’t tear his Achilles due to overuse. Oh crap he’s from the Big East isn’t he, scratch that, this is only a Big Ten thing according to a coach who has coached in a whopping two Big Ten games
To be fair I don’t recall him saying Big East players don’t get injured.
I don’t think it’s nuts to say that a schedule that lends itself to greater fatigue levels (which seems sort of true?) could lead to more injury, and more injury to worse play.
It’s obviously not the primary or even top 5 reason the Big Ten hasn’t won a title but I’d buy that it could result in a marginal decrease of likelihood played out over a decade plus.
(I also don’t think he’s nuts to point out that 9 pm tips suck for the players, they suck for me too)
I think it’s pretty fair for instance to say that the Livers injury had a very real decrease on a conference champion. I think that with him, we are in the final four pretty easily, and the chances of winning a title from the final four, even with Baylor in there, aren’t 0%. Was a title LIKELY? No.
I haven’t researched exhaustively to find other cases (and won’t) but I’m sure they exist.
I don’t think scheduling “has caused the title drought”. I think it’s very possibly a minor contributor!
I love all the detailed analysis, but wasn’t Willard’s claim a bit of hyperbole and exaggeration? I think of it as more of a hot-take and blowing off steam rather than a reasoned doctoral thesis.
In general I think the conference does an extremely poor job with their schedule. Illinois has 6 conference games in a span of 16 days. Then they go having 3 conference games over a 12-13 day span. Maybe they average it out to 9 conference games in a month but it still doesn’t look great.
IIRC Livers in the team knew about and were monitoring his injury long before we did. I think it was a thing even before the covid shut down that year.
Being a very good coach is an extremely lucrative profession. I don’t really seem to see a correlation between coaches salaries and conference tv deals. Pac 12 is terrible Cronin still gets close to 6 a year. If salaries are that high why cant there be better tv times for the players.
Good thing they don’t have 6 games in 13 days then.
Someone mentioned Illinois has 6 in 16 which I’m not seeing? I see a 6-in-18 stretch from January 7 to the 24th which seems to be their worst and does not seem that unusual or onerous. Kansas has a 6-in-17 stretch for example from January 21 to February 6.