Maybe Tom Izzo said it best back in January 2020. After being bullied in a lopsided loss at Purdue, on the same weekend four ranked Big Ten teams went on the road and lost to unranked teams, the Michigan State coach slumped over a table in the Mackey Arena media room and groaned, as only he can: “Our league is the worst because our league is the best.”
As it was then, and as it remains now, this is the Big Ten’s bitter pill. The league’s overall strength allows its participants to spend all year telling you it’s the best conference in the country. And you believe them because the numbers usually agree. Last year’s regular season ended with the Big Ten producing a conference adjusted efficiency rating of +20.90, easily making it the best conference in KenPom.com history (2002-present), a crown it took from the 2004 ACC (+20.32). The Big Ten went into the postseason with six of the top 13 teams in the country, per KenPom, and produced a league-record nine NCAA Tournament teams, including two No. 1 seeds.
Then there’s the flip side. The reality. All those claims of being the best this and the best that start to fall on deaf ears when the conference does nothing in March. Last year’s woeful NCAA Tournament showing felt statistically impossible. Almost a quarter of the tournament’s first round games included Big Ten teams. Only one, Michigan, advanced to the Sweet 16. The conference was the fifth ever to send nine or more teams to the NCAA Tournament. In three of the previous four instances, at least one team advanced to the Final Four, and those years produced two national champions. Last year’s Big Ten was done by the end of the Elite Eight.
And so the league’s title drought, one dating back to Izzo’s 2000 team, goes on.
Yet, here we are ready to say the Big Ten is probably once again America’s toughest conference from top-to-bottom.
