foster loyer

It was another eventful week in college basketball toughest conference, though it wasn't all for the good. After two Penn State players tested positive for COVID-19, Wisconsin and PSU postponed their game originally scheduled for yesterday, the first such instance in the Big Ten this year. (UPDATE: It didn't take long for a second. Tuesday's Purdue-Nebraska game was just postponed.) Here are the results from the week (home team listed second):

• Maryland 70, Wisconsin 64
• MSU 56, Minnesota 81
• Northwestern 72, Iowa 87
• Purdue 78, Rutgers 81
• Nebraska 54, OSU 90
• PSU 85, Indiana 87 (OT)
• Minnesota 59, Wisconsin 71
• Michigan 84, Maryland 73
• Iowa 77, Rutgers 75
• Purdue 58, Illinois 66
• MSU 84, Nebraska 77
• Northwestern 66, Michigan 85
• OSU 60, Minnesota 77

Iowa and Michigan both had 2-0 weeks while Northwestern, predictably, dropped games against each of the aforementioned teams to fall out of first place.

The Standings

*KenPom doesn't include a projection for the rescheduled PSU-Wisconsin game

There isn't much change at the very top beyond Northwestern coming back to earth; Michigan's national ranking is inching up to the level of the three one-loss squads. Despite a loss to Wisconsin, Minnesota is the biggest mover up the rankings because it was sandwiched between blowouts of Michigan State and Ohio State.

Incidentally, MSU continues to plunge; winning by seven over Nebraska didn't do much for the computer judges coming off that 25-point loss to the Gophers and their projections keep going down as preseason data is stripped out and they play clunkers. I'm not going to dedicate an entire section to MSU's problems for the third straight week but I'll note Tom Izzo benched Rocket Watts in favor of playing freshman AJ Hoggard and Foster Loyer at point guard against the Huskers; Watts had an up-and-down 15 minutes at shooting guard.

[Hit THE JUMP for NET rankings, players coming on strong, outlier stats, new tiers, and this week's schedule.]

I thought Rutgers would be the least likely team to find itself atop the conference standings this season. I was wrong!

Northwestern went 3-17 in the Big Ten last year. They're now 3-0 this season after following up last week's upset of Michigan State with victories against Indiana and Ohio State. Here are the results from last week's conference slate (home team listed second):

• Purdue 55, Iowa 70
• Nebraska 53, Wisconsin 67
• Rutgers 68, Ohio State 80
• Penn State 81, Illinois 98
• Northwestern 74, Indiana 67
• Iowa 95, Minnesota 102 (OT)
• Wisconsin 85, Michigan State 76
• Michigan 80, Nebraska 69
• Maryland 70, Purdue 73
• Indiana 60, Illinois 69
• Ohio State 70, Northwestern 71

It was a particularly good week for Northwestern and Illinois and a rough one for Indiana, which lost to both aforementioned teams. Meanwhile, the most entertaining game of the week was Iowa's late collapse and eventual overtime loss at Minnesota. The Hawkeyes still can't guard anybody.

The Standings

Now ordered by conference record since everyone has actually played multiple Big Ten games.

The top-to-bottom strength of the conference is remarkable; 13 of the 14 teams are inside the top 55 nationally when you average KenPom and Torvik rankings. KenPom predicts all 13 of those teams to finish with at least eight conference wins, leaving Nebraska—which isn't an awful bottom-end power conference team!—with a projected 3-17 record.

Even with that 3-0 start, Northwestern is predicted to finish .500 in Big Ten play. Ohio State and Indiana are projected to finish with losing conference records despite sitting just outside the top 20 teams in the country; ditto MSU at #32. It's a scarily strong league; the Big Ten and Big 12 are well in front of the rest of the pack in KenPom's conference rankings with the former topping the list. Fox Sports' latest (way too early) bracket has 11 B1G squads in the field with Wisconsin/Iowa as two-seeds and Michigan/Illinois as three-seeds.

[Hit THE JUMP for five-out Northwestern, State's terrible defensive profile, and more.]

12/3/2019 – Michigan 43, Louisville 58 – 7-1

The John Beilein era was not exactly thick with offensive debacles, so everyone was probably thinking of the same two games as Louisville constricted Michigan's offense last night. One was last year's Sweet 16 game against Texas Tech. That ended Michigan's season, after which three guys and the coach left. Also that was a historically great and very weird defense. So there's no data on how Michigan recovered from that.

The other, though, was Michigan doing this at South Carolina three years ago:

points, twos, threes

This, too, came after Michigan had just lodged a couple of encouraging wins in a tournament. They'd hammered Marquette and SMU in New York. The trip to Columbia was Michigan's first road game of the season. Like Louisville, South Carolina had played no one of note, winning a couple of games against fringe top 100 foes and mixing in some cupcakes. Any spare prep time they'd had all season got applied to Michigan since it was the first real test on the schedule. And Michigan got blitzed.

The good news is that result had close to no bearing on the rest of the season. This was the Maverick Morgan year. Until mid-January Michigan's defense did a fair job of obscuring what would end up the #4 offense on Kenpom. The South Carolina game (and a Texas game a couple weeks later Michigan actually won) were so far out of trend that they look like a different team took the court for a couple nonconference games. Torvik's chart of adjusted offensive efficiency that year:

red: ncaa average efficiency, thick yellow: moving average, thin yellow: linear trend line, dotted: 5 game moving average

I don't have to tell you which one is South Carolina. For their part, they had an elite defense all year, finishing third, and went on a Final Four run after landing a seven-seed. Louisville is going to have an elite defense as well.

It'll be fine. If you'd offered me three of four against Iowa State, UNC, Gonzaga, and Louisville—with none of them at home—you'd lose your arm because I shook it so fast. Eating a schedule loss at the end of that sequence is hard to watch but less indicative of what's going to happen down the road than Atlantis.

[After THE JUMP: Phil Martelli on fjords]