Why Big 10 Basketball Excels but Lacks Recent Titles

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00:00Why is Big 10 basketball so good, yet so far away from a title?

00:11Yeah, you know, a lot of that's been circumstantial.

00:14They've been in a lot of Final Fours.

00:16The last time I checked, and I haven't checked this in a little while,

00:19but the last time I checked, they had about as many Final Fours, if not more,

00:23than any conference in college basketball since the 2020 season,

00:28or excuse me, the 2000 season, when they won their most recent national championship.

00:33And so they've had a ton of Final Fours.

00:35They just haven't had the right team to get all the way home.

00:38I mean, I think Purdue last year's Purdue team would have won the championship

00:42a lot of years, including probably the prior year against the 2023 UConn team,

00:47but they weren't beating UConn 2024, one of the really terrific teams we've seen

00:52in this century.

00:55Michigan State makes the final in Detroit in 2009.

00:58Well, great, but the team that they played against, Carolina,

01:02was one of the legendary teams in college basketball history.

01:06They were fantastic.

01:07They had four first-round picks on their team.

01:10It's just sometimes it works out like that.

01:12And they have always been a deeper conference than they have been

01:17a conference that produces the absolute elite team.

01:21That's just the way it's been for most of this century.

01:24It's been great for their fans to watch.

01:26It's certainly been great to call on BTN, but producing that one special,

01:32extraordinary team just hasn't happened.

01:35You know, I got to ask you, when you go into this season, do you think that,

01:41like you know how those new teams from the West have come into the Big Ten

01:44in football, what do you think they're going to be like when they come in

01:47on the basketball side?

01:49Well, I think that, first of all, you've got the fact that they were very

01:54careful about scheduling these games.

01:57They've gone more for multiple days of rest, two to three days rest

02:03in between games.

02:05They've been very careful about that, something that wasn't always a high

02:09consideration in conferences like the Pac-12 in the past.

02:12They were used to playing on one-day prep a lot.

02:15Now you get more days of prep, more days of opportunity if you have a bad game

02:20to try to regroup for the next one.

02:22We've seen, to this point, statistically, teams have not performed well

02:27in football when traveling multiple time zones.

02:31But they've performed fine in other sports.

02:33I mean, I pointed out, we talked about this a couple weeks ago,

02:36Pitt's women's volleyball team has been to the West Coast on multiple occasions

02:40already this season and is undefeated wherever they play.

02:44And has only lost one set so far.

02:47So I don't know that the travel is impacting every athlete and every sport.

02:51I think basketball players will do fine with it, especially with the care that,

02:55at least in the Big Ten that's been presented to scheduling,

02:57I'm not saying they haven't in the Big 12 or the ACC,

03:00which are also going to have long trips.

03:02I just haven't studied that.

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