The book has officially been closed on the non-conference portion of the Big Ten schedule. As a collective, the league finished with a 130-49 record. This is a tad worse from last season’s 136-44 mark, and even further down from the conference’s 122-32 mark of two seasons ago. And as much as league official would like to do so, this can’t all be blamed on Rutgers’ 6-7 record to start the season. Despite the fact that the conference appears to have fallen off a bit, there are a number of positives and negatives to glean from this season’s opening chapter.

Northwestern finished up non-conference play with a 12-1 record, putting themselves in position to make their first every trip to the NCAA Tournament. (AP Photo/Matt Marton)

A three-team pack has emerged as the clear front-runners heading into conference play. Michigan State, Maryland and Purdue have all impressed and can be viewed as potential Final Four teams. The trio has combined to lose only two games on the year, with both of those defeats coming to teams that are currently ranked in the top 10. Sparty has beaten a whopping seven teams among the KenPom top 100, while the Boilermakers have beaten four and the Terps three. All three of these teams are in line for protected seeds come March if they perform well during conference play.

Among other Big Ten teams, Northwestern has done exactly what it needed to do in getting to 12-1 with its sole loss to preseason No. 1 North Carolina. The Wildcats’ schedule wasn’t arduous but they avoided any resume-disrupting losses. They still may not end up in the NCAA Tournament, depending on how conference play goes, but Chris Collins’ team has done a nice job positioning itself for it. Iowa also really can’t complain after getting to conference play at 9-3. The Hawkeyes put together a 3-3 record against teams in the KenPom top 100, and also avoided the bad loss bugaboo.

In less encouraging news, three Big Ten teams that started the season in the Top 25 are no longer ranked. Indiana suffered a brutal stretch at the end of November and early December, with losses to Wake Forest and UNLV in Maui and an ACC/Big Ten Challenge undressing at the hands of Duke. Michigan was easily outclassed in blowout losses to Xavier and SMU, and Wisconsin lost two games on its home floor to Western Illinois and Milwaukee. The struggles of these schools hurts the overall perception of the league because expectations were quite a bit higher for each this season.

All told, the conference finished with losing records in head-to-head matchups with the American, the Big East and the Big 12. Chances for victories against good teams generally fell by the wayside as the league went 4-13 in games against teams currently ranked in the AP Top 25. Compared with recent years, the Big Ten does not appear to be quite as strong from top to bottom despite three potentially elite teams in the fold. Still, as of right now, the league is in good position for six bids to the NCAA Tournament, with a distinct possibility of seven. The Big 12, ACC and even the Pac-12 can probably stick their chests out a bit more after non-conference play, but the Big Ten is still having a solid season and will ride the fortunes of its top three teams the rest of the way.

Brendan Brody (307 Posts)

Brendan Brody is in his fourth season covering the Big Ten for RTC. Email him at brendan.brody@gmail.com, or follow him on twitter @berndon4.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2015 at 10:31 am by Brendan Brody and is filed under big ten, feature, microsites. Tagged: indiana, maryland, michigan, michigan state, northwestern, purdue, rutgers, wisconsin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.