The Big Ten is the best college basketball conference in the country.
But don’t take my word for it. I’m just going by what Big Ten coaches tell us approximately 100% of the times microphones are in front of their faces.
The league’s preseason media days event in Minneapolis was one such example.
“It’s the best conference in college basketball,” Michigan’s Juwan Howard said, stating the apparently obvious.
“I believe the Big Ten has been the deepest league in college basketball the last three years,” Ohio State’s Chris Holtmann said, “and I honestly don’t see that changing.”
Illinois’ Brad Underwood concurred, saying he takes “a great deal of pride in being a part of this conference that has been the best basketball league in the country the last few years in particular.”
Northwestern’s Chris Collins called the Big Ten “the very best” and assured it would be “as good as ever” this season. Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, the dean of league coaches, said it “could be the greatest conference in the country in all sports” like it already is, he noted, in men’s basketball.
On and on they went. On and on they continue to go, even as 17-1, No. 3-ranked Purdue has distanced itself from the rest of a league that’s just kind of hanging in there. Illinois has won four straight to get to 13-5, but it’s nowhere to be found in the Top 25. Michigan is a 10-7 afterthought, not to be confused with Ohio State the 10-7 afterthought, Indiana the 11-6 afterthought or Iowa the 12-6 afterthought. Michigan State doesn’t have the kind of talent that sets it apart anymore. Rutgers — the only team to beat the Boilermakers — is in second place, and have we really reached the point where we’re using Rutgers to make the Big Ten’s case?
If we’re going by national championships, the case has long been closed; the Big Ten hasn’t won one since Izzo, then a rising star, beat Billy Donovan’s Florida upstarts in 2000. The ACC has claimed eight titles since then, with Virginia most recently breaking through in 2019. The Big East has won six, four of them coming before that league split apart a decade ago and two of them, both by Villanova, coming since. Donovan’s Gators won two of the SEC’s three titles since the turn of the century, and the Big 12 likewise has three, including Baylor’s in 2021 and Kansas’ in 2022.
Even the American has a title, thanks to UConn (which since has rejoined the Big East) in 2014. The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out the 2020 NCAA Tournament.
This is season No. 23 since a giddy Izzo and the Spartans cut down the nets in Indianapolis, so consider this a 23-and-plea: On April 3 in Houston, can the Big Ten finally have the last team standing and end the embarrassment and emptiness that comes with all this best-in-the-country talk?
It might be a Purdue-or-bust scenario. The Boilers have been as serious as any contender since pounding Gonzaga and Duke back-to-back in Portland, Oregon, in November. None of the best teams — not Houston, not Alabama, not even Kansas with Jalen Wilson — has a player who’s close to as dominant as the Boilers’ 7-4 Zach Edey, the runaway favorite for consensus national player of the year.
Iowa center Luka Garza grabbed all the awards in 2021. Wisconsin 7-footer Frank Kaminsky did so in 2015, when the Badgers reached the title game. Illinois 7-footer Kofi Cockburn, Edey-like in many respects, was a two-time All-American. But none of the three could hold sway over a game like Edey, who scored 32 points and grabbed 17 rebounds — and muscled in the winning bucket with three seconds to go — in Monday’s riveting 64-63 win at Michigan State.
Hot take: The Big Ten hasn’t had a player this much better than everybody else since Glenn Robinson, Purdue’s last Wooden Award winner in 1994.
“One guy’s pushing out, one guy’s pushing in,” Izzo said of trying to defend against Edey. “One guy’s 400 pounds, the other’s 150.”
Gonzaga big man Drew Timme, one of the top players in the land, likened Edey to a “moose.”
“You have to put your hands up and just hope he misses it,” Timme said.
And as Duke coach Jon Scheyer put it, “There’s nobody else like him.”
An emailer named Greg Smith writes to me often about all things Purdue. This week, he wanted to know why I’d ranked the Boilers at No. 2 in my AP poll, behind Houston.
“I just love Houston’s athleticism, defense and ferocity,” I replied, all of it true.
But I also balk, frankly, at putting a Big Ten team at the very top. Too many of the best ones since 2000 have fallen short of living up to it.
Big Ten coaches will say the league is a meat grinder, that the competition is unrelentingly strong, the games unrelentingly physical and that it all takes a toll. Some of them will say the NCAA Tournament isn’t officiated in a manner that suits Big Ten teams, another common refrain.
Buy into it if you want to.
But, hey, the Moose is loose. Edey gives his team, and his league, a heck of a chance at 23-and-glee. It would be great to see.
