B1G MBB Mythology 2020-2021
How did B1G basketball get to be rated so high this year? My theory is that we played a lot of games against the ACC, which was nowhere near as good as usual. For example, Michigan State was considered a top team after beating Notre Dame and Duke.
What am I missing?
They beat the crap out of each other all year, and are all out of steam now. Losing in the BIG Tourney, was the best thing to happen to Michigan. Too bad Livers was hurt, or we would have had a real shot.
I follow Pac 12 Basketball, and have season tickets to USC Basketvall, and the conference sucked this year...and there are 5 PAC teams still playing.
I don’t buy this “they beat the crap out of each other all year narrative”. Just feels like an excuse to me. Every team grinds and plays hard. The B1G isn’t so much bigger, badder, and tougher that it should make a huge difference. There are tough, physical, defensive teams in the big 12 too.
Big 12 does have tough, physical, defensive teams - and isn't faring much better than B1G. Baylor looks like a contender, but it's down to them and maybe Kansas; everyone else was knocked out early.
The style of ball played in B1G and Big 12 doesn't seem to be working in NCAA.
They’re not matching up well at all and they’re being outcoached. Fran and Brad were laughably outcoached.
LOL...Big 12 has 1 team left, just like the BIG...but ok. Play in the Pac 12 was underwhelming this year...but they came to play in Indy.
Me too, Cali. It's hard to fathom the disorganized messes I saw in Pac 12 play suddenly transformed into NCAA juggernauts.
I think it's true B1G teams are worn out by conference schedule. I also think officiating in NCAA tournament neutralizes B1G's size/strength/defense, and favors shooters/floppers/offense
I agree that officiating is a big part of it, but I'll also say that it really appears that other conference's guards are much quicker than B1G teams are used to... B1G defenses were supposed to be good, and that has definitely not panned out. Time to see if Michigan is as overrated as the rest of the B1G apparently was....
The quick whistles, really penalize B1G-style handsy defense.
I'm not sure about the guard quickness thing. I'd buy it from Houston/Oregon/Baylor but are Loyola/Oral Roberts' guards really quicker than the guys in our conference?
I've said this elsewhere but trying to discern the quality of a conference based on the results of a single-elimination tournament is always dicey. For example, there's a good chance the Pac-12 has 4 Sweet 16 teams, with a ceiling of 5. That would be more teams than the rest of the P5 combined. Are we to believe that the Pac-12 was laying in wait to destroy the rest of CBB in March? Probably not. But is it possible that they had some favorable matchups and picked up some wins? Sure.
The Big 10 hasn't done well this far in this tourney but sometimes it happens. I certainly haven't been overly impressed with any of the P5 conference teams in this tourney.
Why is it so absurd to think Pac12 is actually good? This is a conference that recruits just as well as any other. AFAIK this narrative is purely based on feelings and isn't entrentched in reality.
I can only speak for what I've seen, notmaizen - I live out here and watched a ton of B1G and Pac 12 basketball. The teams at the bottom of the Pac 12 were absolutely horrible, and the ones at the top didn't seem much better.
I saw Oregon State look like one of the worst P5 teams in the country. They lost back-to-back to Wyoming and Portland!
The Oregon, Colorado, UCLA and Oregon State teams I'm watching in the tournament look completely different than their regular season selves.
I freely acknowledge either I saw these teams at their worst and/or my perception of these teams' strength was way off. My own eyes deceived me.
Maybe because if you actually watched it, the Pac 12 wasn’t that good this year ?♂️
I agree with this, bronx. Some results make no sense, and some have to do with momentum, officiating, and matchups. Style plays a role too.
Examples:
- Syracuse was awful this year, easily worst ACC team to make the tourney - but their match-up zone gives teams fits, and they're suddenly shooting the lights out.
- Oregon St. stunk all year, then put things together for their tournament. Suddenly they're hot.
- Oregon was a bad match-up for Iowa - their jackrabbits make Garza a huge liability, and they absolutely torched Iowa's porous d. Every time either team tried to defend, they blew the whistle.
There's a reason they call it March Madness, right?
This is absolute horse shit. Every conference beats itself up; they all play the same amount of games. The Big 10 benefits from media bias.The PAC12 is often underrated in both football and basketball simply because people don't see their games and for some reason always consider Western teams "soft."
It's true that the 12 has lacked marquee, top-5 teams in recent years. But top to bottom, it's still a very strong conference in both sports. Most every time a B10 football team plays an upper-tier Pac 12 team -- and this applies to Michigan especially -- it ends up losing. As for this current basketball tournament, the proof is in the pudding. The P12 is thriving; the B10 is getting its ass kicked. Face reality, dude.
March 23rd, 2021 at 10:28 AM ^
The reality, dude, is we are talking basketball, not football. The reality, dude, is the PAC was not very good during this regular season and hasn’t been very good for the last few years...I am a season ticket holder and have had to suffer through a crappy conference. However, the BIG was terrific this year....great team, great players....yet...there are 4 PAC teams in the Sweet 16 and only 1 BIG team.
That, plus the inbred schedule. Truth is we’re not that good. My B1G-centric bracket is a monumental dumpster fire.
After Ohio State and then Illinois, isn't everyone's bracket a dumpster fire?
Yeah and I had Michigan State going all the way. My bracket was done before the tournament even started.
Seriously? I don't do much gambling, but I would like to gamble with you sometime. It could be anything, basketball, football, horses, dogs, gamecocks, cards, pool, dice. Doesn't matter. I just want some extra cash.
Joking, obviously
Actually I had both OSU and ILL losing in rounds 2/3; it's the Big XII teams shitting the bed (OkSt, WVU, Texas) that's torched my bracket...
That pretty much sums it up.
I think you're missing the 10 other posts that have already discussed this ad nauseam.
I think there was a little bit of being overrated, but I also saw someone mention this on social media somewhere, but I think the difference in how games are officiated between B1G games and tourney games has been a thorn in the conferences side. Look at Hunter Dickinson last game, he got called for a flagrant on a move that I've watched at least 4 different centers in the B1G use.
I get that this doesn't account for everything that's happened, but I could see it being part of the reason a whole conference has been underwhelming in the tournament.
Right. Maybe instruct the refs to stop allowing football-on-basketball violence, and the Big Ten's better situated for the post season.
I just want to win tonight. Really don't care too much about anyone else at this point.
We played a lot of games vs the ACC?
How about the B1G just isn’t as good as we/everyone thought.
Wisconsin won the conference last year and started out ranked like #4, Illinois beat the shit out of Duke, Iowa crushed North Carolina and hung with Gonzaga (despite not playing well) and Michigan ran out to an 18-0 start. There are legitimately a lot of tough teams in the conference this year but yeah there was not much of a non-conference schedule to test that strength. But also, the tournament is just weird.
Did you watch the Iowa vs Gonzaga game? Or, did you see the final score? Iowa did not hang with Gonzaga. Gonzaga kicked their asses and were in complete control before half. They led by ~20 for most of the 2nd half. The final score was closer than that game really was.
March 22nd, 2021 at 10:31 PM ^
I did watch the game, as a matter of fact. And I thought Iowa played like shit and despite that fact, I thought they fared pretty well. It definitely could've been a lot worse. Gonzaga wins that game 7/8x out of 10, but it's a lot closer in most of those other games. Iowa also had the national player of the year which also garnered a lot of hype for the team and for the conference.
How well have teams coached by Underwood, McCaffrey, Holtman, and Painter done vs seeding / expectations in past tournaments? There's your answer.
Remember when Michigan (football) soundly beat ND in the road in 2006? ND was a decent team and it was a great win, but in retrospect it probably boosted expectations too high. Only at the end of the season were we able to measure that team (very good, but a notch beneath championship contenders like Florida and USC).
This tourney reminds me of that. You could also go with Big Ten football, 1970-1979.
Hot take brah.
The Big Ten reminds me of a group doing that stupid thing in a movie of going in a spooky house at night, and then disappearing mysteriously—maybe not always mys-staee-riously—one by one.
Here's hoping the Wolverines are the character in that movie who gets out alive.
There might be a dozen reasons why the B1G conference teams have sputtered in this NCAA MBB tournament. The Rutgers loss Sunday evening was a case of just choking in the last 90 seconds. Loyola-Chicago really outplayed the Illini and won because of their stud defense. Probably just bad karma for the Illini and of course great karma for Loyola-Chicago and Sister Mary-Jean.
My take, lame as it sounds, is there is so much parity amongst these teams that made the big dance. There's a lot of talent out there. As in all sports, the individuals and team teams that peak the latest have the highest chances of winning out or making a deep run.
- Loyola Chicago was under seeded and a tough match up for Illinois.
- OSU's loss is shocking but then again Oral Roberts also beat Florida.
- Purdue lost in Purdue fashion.
- Wisconsin looked solid against UNC but was no match for Baylor.
- Rutgers couldn't close out against Houston.
- Iowa picked a bad day to shoot cold.
- MSU is terrible.
There ya go again, dealing with facts rather than woe-is-us feelz.
The only bad losses are Purdue and OSU. Maryland and Rutgers beat higher seeded teams and Rutgers outplayed Houston. Iowa lost to a team who hadn’t played yet and had fresh legs. Wisconsin killed UNC and lost as expected to Baylor. Illinois lost to a top ten Kenpom team. MSU didn’t make the tournament.
A single elimination tournament says very little about conference strength. The narratives are dumb.
They benefited from the same bias that benefits the SEC in football. Once you start highly ranked, regardless of rationale, you generally stay there.
The short non-conference season skewed the advanced rankings. We didn’t have time to play a bunch of Houston Baptists to drag down our strength of schedule like usual. Then the Big Ten did well enough in a small sample of quality non-con games to gain a high (but potentially misleading) ranking. And then we played 17-20 games against each other. So you had teams like PSU and IU with NCAA tournament-worthy Kenpom rankings because of this feedback loop, and the teams that were actually good got an extra boost. So Iowa and OSU get 2 seeds with very flawed teams, and Purdue gets a 4.
You’ve got it. Illinois played 3 NCAA Tournament participants in the non-conference: Missouri, Baylor, and Ohio. They lost to Missouri. They lost by 13 to Baylor. They won by 2 against Ohio. This is a small sample-size of feedback that has pretty much been ignored. Michigan did not play any NCAA Tournament competition out of conference. The B10 seems to have better big men than the other conferences but lacks the athletes at the guard/wing positions that most of the teams still playing have. I don’t ever recall more misperception of the quality of the teams in the NCAA Tournament than this season. It makes sense with the conference-heavy schedules and fewer games played by most teams.
I think your analysis makes a lot of sense in explaining how the conference got so highly regarded as the season went on.
What happened in December against non-conference foes is pretty irrelevant in March in a normal year. In this year, when various schedules were all over the map, it's useless.
I'd argue the B1G's poor tournament performance is related to the mis-seeding of teams throughout the bracket because of the odd schedules, various cancellations / delays, etc. as well as the fact the B1G didn't fully separate itself as it might have done in a full season. Maybe OSU and Iowa are truly 3 or 4 seeds in a full regular season as an example? Maybe Purdue is a 6?
Yeah I think the inbred data from the shortened schedule caused the conference to be overrated. This is how the SEC always ends up with like 8 teams in the top 25 in football too. It is hard to discern anything about conference strength from a small schedule that has very few OOC games.
A bunch of 1 game samples... remember the Oakland game at the start of the season? Anything can happen in a single elimination tournament. You play weird teams, you play weird line ups, you have limited time to prepare, there is just weird randomness all over the place. I think after the Iowa game the Big 10 is now 6-7 in the tournament. If Michigan and Maryland(?) win that's over .500 for the first weekend.
The Big Ten was overrated. Michigan torched Iowa, and they are a better team than OSU with Livers. I think OSU shot lights out in that first game and M still won. That leaves two elite teams, Illinois and Michigan. I have no idea wth happened with Illinois in that game. They wouldn't let Michigan make any sort of pass, but they were content to let ILL-Chicago take hand offs all game. It was weird.
I agree that the style of rugged play isn't helping. I wish they'd get rid of the damn charge. It's just duded flopping all over the floor. Stand your damn ground. That said, I don't like watching clutch and grab. Basketball is a skill game. The Big should be officiated tightly until guys get out of the habit of grabbing anyone making a cut or moving in a direction they don't want them too. Active hands and move your feet.
It's dynamic with covid and the non-conference schedule being very limited. This plus drawing really challenging matchups in the tournament doesn't help either. We should feel good that we won the B1G, and got a #1 seed, but the B1G as a whole is not as good as billed.
Two things for all the hand-wringers to know:
1) Generally, the B1G acquits itself very well in this tournament.
2) For the umpteenth time I will note that over the past 50 years the NCAA basketball champion university has resided east of the Mississippi 45 times. This year may well simply be an anomaly-a huge outlier...it's not over yet.
Hmmm....unless you count winning it. Hasn't happened since 2000. Loooong drought.