Baskteball

Kicking off a weekly Big Ten hoops column highlighting ten—not fourteen—of the most interesting teams, games, players, storylines, and statistics in the best basketball conference in the country.

1. The Big Ten has an enormous middle class

Wisconsin’s clear status as the frontrunner is the strongest preseason narrative surrounding the Big Ten and while the Badgers are compelling in their own right (aside from their unaesthetic style, of course), there’s another storyline that may not be getting enough attention: the middle of the Big Ten is as strong as ever and the fight for survival in the morass of teams directly behind Wisconsin will provide quality, reasonably high-stakes basketball on a near-nightly basis.

There are the Badgers, and there’s everyone else—you could take Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Ohio State and put them in almost any order, 2-through-8 looks so fluid in the Big Ten. To the point, Ken Pomeroy’s ratings have one team in the top ten (Wisconsin), but eleven in the top forty. Dan Hanner’s projections corroborate: Wisconsin—and nobody else—is in the top ten, but there are five in the top 25 and nine in the top 40.

It’s unlikely that there will be eleven of fourteen teams in the top forty by season’s end—Indiana (26) and Purdue (40) immediately stand out as overrated by Pomeroy’s system—but there should be a great number of enjoyable games between the middle-tier teams. That should be the biggest intriguing thing about the league this season: the title race likely won’t be very suspenseful, but the jockeying for position in the standings (and eventually on the seed lines for the NCAA Tournament) will be fascinating. The Big Ten will be a conference of staunchly upper-middle class teams this season—filling new subdivisions along artificial lakes and living the American Dream.

2. Top-40 Kenpom teams often make the tournament

Since the tournament expanded from 65 to a nonsensical 68, only two top-forty teams per season were excluded from the NCAA Tournament. Of those, Wichita State—ranked 59th entering the tournament—won the NIT, Stanford—ranked 53rd—won it, Baylor defeated Iowa in the NIT final, and SMU lost in the final (to Minnesota) last season.

Pomeroy’s preseason top-forty has eleven Big Ten teams (Wisconsin 6, MSU 12, OSU 14. Michigan 15, Indiana 26, Iowa 32, Maryland 33, Nebraska 34, Minnesota 37, Illinois 38, Purdue 40) and, because of the inevitable cannibalization that comes along with the zero-sum nature of conference play, it’s essentially impossible for all of those teams to finish that highly. Still, the above chart is illustrative of a basic implication in Pomeroy’s ratings: the Big Ten probably has a lot of tournament-caliber teams and monitoring which ones fall on the right and wrong sides of the NCAA bubble will surely be a compelling late-season storyline.

[After the JUMP: who's in? Who's out? Does age help you anymore?]