There’s no planet where Northwestern is the second-best team in the conference. Using that to claim that there aren’t good teams in the Big Ten is not a fair take.
Maryland, Indiana, Illinois, MSU, Iowa and Rutgers are all better teams than Northwestern, I think most are better than Northwestern by a decent margin?
The Big Ten KenPom thing illustrates that depth in the middle of the league. Basically, that you can play a stretch of schedule like MSU has played for the last month without really coming up for air.
It doesn’t mean Purdue is better than Alabama, but it means if Purdue was exactly as good as Alabama, it would probably lose more games in conference play.
It’s not about Ohio State, it is about Nebraska being better than the 4 worst teams in the SEC.
Side note but why are we saying Xavier is better than Indiana, for example? Basically identical on KenPom, IU won at their gym and IU is playing better right now.
You know I have an infatuation with top 10 offenses and a crappy defense. Thought I could sneak them in. But replace with Marquette the point still stands.
And yeah we just disagree on what’s valuable here, and I think even you would acknowledge that the Big Ten is unlikely to look “better” than any of these conferences in March again because none of the multitude of “good” teams that make this such a gauntlet are even bonafide top 25 teams in the country this year, in a weak season nationally.
The Big Ten’s second worst team (Nebraska) being 20 spots higher on Kenpom than the SEC’s 4th worst team (Georgia) is so so so so so much less meaningful than having two top 10 teams is.
He just seems like he’s a case of a good player playing on a loaded HS and AAU team and sort of got obscured…probably should have been a sure fire P5 recruit.
Ahhh, even then I just don’t think there’s any correlation between how a league does in the NCAA Tournament.
Like is it one team making a run that you want to see? Teams performance against seed? Winning the whole thing? Overall record? How far the best team goes?
I don’t think there’s a straightforward way to even measure that. And I’m not sure what measuring it tells us.
Fair. The tourney is fluky too, like losing last year didn’t invalidate that there were a bunch of good B1G teams.
This year is just such a down year to me, I’m just not buying any of these teams at a national level. Like throw any Big Ten team from 2-11 into the Big East or the Big 12…they’re solidly in the tournament probably but none of them are top 3 teams in those conferences. And Purdue’s not running away with those either IMO.
Props to Key for trying, but if he can’t handle some of the contact that’s gotten him going down in this game he shouldn’t be playing. Protect your players.
So what is the board view on Maryland? It sure seems like their early conference season struggles were home/road driven (0-4 on the road, average margin of defeat 17 points (yes, we killed them, but they also had 2 14 point losses), 2-0 at home) as had their “recovery” (6-0 at home, 1-2 on the road, with the one win @ Minnesota). Their road losses were better though - single digits at Purdue and at MSU.
It’s easy to look at the remaining schedule - 2 at home, 3 on the road - and say they finish 2-3. But their road games are @Nebraska (not a gimme, but very winnable), @OSU (who has quit and hasn’t won a game in 47 days anyway), and @PSU. 4-1 finish?
I clearly remember saying after we ran them out of the gym that they would be playing on Wednesday in the BTT. Oops.
It is impressive what they have done and Willard has to get some credit bur I really can’t see them making any noise in the BTT or NCAA. So that’s my way of saying that I am still not seeing it with them.
I feel similar. Have to tip your cap to them even if I can’t quite figure out why they are good or if I trust them. But they are way better than our Wolverines right now so kudos I guess.
