College Basketball

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Dear Bo Ryan,

Thanks for the win.

Love,
Boilermaker Basketball

but seriously, anybody keeping up on the Big Ten this year? probably not you West Virgi... er.. uh, Michigan guys... seeing as their men's team pretty much just sucks. anyway, here are the current standings:

Rank	Team	Conference	Overall
1	Purdue	10-1	19-5
2	Indiana	8-1	19-3
3	Michigan State	9-2	20-3
4	Wisconsin	9-2	19-4
5	Ohio State	7-3	16-7
6	Minnesota	5-5	15-7
7	Iowa	4-8	11-14
8	Penn State	3-8	11-12
9	Illinois	2-9	10-14
10	Michigan	2-9	6-17
11	Northwestern	0-10	7-14

my boilermakers won a huge game tonight @Wisconsin (where they had been 51-2 in Big Ten play since the 2000-01 season) to take sole possesion of first place. MSU is doing well also, though their losses to Penn State and Iowa are very perplexing and kind of throw up some warning flags for me come tourney time. Indiana has a gaudy record, but no real big wins to speak of and Wisconsin has a few decent wins (@Texas, vs. Indiana) but were also beaten soundly by Marquette and Duke. OSU is kind of middle of the road... they're probably good enough to make the tournament with wins over Florida and Syracuse, though they can't slip up much over the next 3 weeks.

I'm betting 5 Big Ten teams will make the tournament with none higher than a 2 seed (possibly MSU if they can get some decent B10 wins coming up). everyone is really hating on the Big Ten this year, but really it's only because of the bottom teams in the league. The top half is pretty good (MSU, PU, UW, IU, OSU) but the bottom half is terrible at best (NW, UofM, PSU [w/o Geary Claxton], UofI, Iowa). People continually point to MSU's losses at Iowa and at PSU as evidence that they are terrible, but those same people so easily forget the quality wins (Bradley, BYU, Purdue, Texas, Missouri, NC State). In reality, it is just a top heavy conference, whereas some of the other conferences have decent quality from top to bottom, but not necessarily enough quality to send a lot of teams to the tournament. The ACC (generally deemed the best conference) might only get 3~5 teams in, depending on what happens down the stretch. Should be interesting to see how things play out, but if you're curious you can check out these links for good info:

• College RPI
  
• Bracketology
  
• Bubble Watch
  
• ESPN Power 16
  
• Boiler Up!