By Danny
Sternfield
Thursday, January 15th, 2004
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It all seemed to happen so fast. The Big 10 turned into the Mediocre 11.
A conference that used to be counted on to send six or seven teams to the
NCAA tournament might get four in this year. It can't be that bad,
right?
Wrong.
The good news: there is no good news. The bad news: the conference lacks
a truly dominating team and, since the league is fairly blah from top to
bottom, the once-intense rivalries don't seem to exist. After all, if Indiana
can't win at home against a Temple team that doesn't have a winning record,
how will they fare when they go into West Lafayette to play Purdue?
Upon a closer look at the conference, one will discover that it is indeed
that bad. But what -- or who -- exactly is making the Big 10 look so small?
Look no further than the Spartans.
Michigan State came into the season highly-ranked and while you have to give
coach Tom Izzo and the Spartans credit for scheduling the nation's top teams,
you also have to take that credit away for losing to every one of those teams.
As a matter of fact, every ranked team that Michigan State has come up against
has beaten them. Just to prove that the Spartans didn't discriminate, they
fell to unranked UCLA, as well.
One team doesn't make or break a conference, however. Illinois entered this
season with high hopes and the conference's Preseason Player of the Year
in Dee Brown. Although the Illini manage to barely hang around the Top-25
(No. 25 as of press time), their miscues have critics and fans dazed and
confused.
First, Illinois' 23-game home winning streak is snapped by Purdue. As if
that wasn't bad enough, a 19-point loss to Providence and an unthinkable
loss to Northwestern -- the first to the Wildcats in nearly a decade -- made
it official: Illinois is nothing special.
If there's a bright spot, it is the play of Purdue and Wisconsin. Devin Harris
leads a Badger team whose no style, all substance game produced back to back
regular season titles, not to mention an 11-3 start this year. Purdue's Gene
Keady just notched his 500th career win against the aforementioned Badgers
and has his team playing with the trademark discipline and defense that he
is known for.
Add it all together, throw in a mediocre Iowa, Minnesota, and Ohio State,
and consider an Indiana team that seems content with wasting this season
and waiting for the highly-touted recruiting class to come in next year,
and what you have is a conference that should change the Big in its
name to three more appropriate letters: NIT.
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