Around College Basketball and the B1G

Mark Titus, a Big Ten fan and Ohio State's greatest walk-on of all time, has a really great article looking at how bad the Big Ten is this season. I highly suggest you read it. Here are some of my favorite excerpts: "People think Big Ten basketball is unwatchable because the league’s teams aren’t as efficient, its players aren’t as skilled, and its coaches aren’t as smart as its supporters would like to believe. It’s to the point where I’m more interested in figuring out which Big Ten school has the least-terrible rap video (spoiler: It’s not Purdue) than which has the best basketball team, and things are likely only going to get worse in the NCAA tournament." "This means that if the tournament were to start today, Purdue would be the only Big Ten team expected to make the Sweet 16, which isn’t exactly reassuring considering that I wouldn’t trust Boilermakers head coach Matt Painter to make me a sandwich — let alone lead a team with obvious flaws to two tourney wins." "I’m tempted to say this is the worst Big Ten basketball season of my lifetime, but that title will (hopefully) forever belong to 2003–04, when three teams made the tourney, only one advanced to the Sweet 16 (and immediately lost by 10 points), and Kim Kardashian’s husband of 72 days led the conference in both scoring and rebounding as a freshman."

A good friend of mine, Ricky, likes to predict the NCAA tournament field with his statistical background. He accurately predicted 15 of the 16 seeds released by the NCAA committee yesterday, and his review of his picks and why those 16 teams were selected is linked above. I suggest reading his post and the rest of his work.