Cameron Young- News Editor
The last ten months of sports have been an undeniably weird, unique, and constantly changing period of time for both those who play and those who watch sports of all kinds. A year ago, we wouldn’t be familiar with the concepts of COVID lists, only-conference schedules, and bubbles. Those who are passionate about all sorts of sports have been through the ringer as far as being able to keep up with all of this madness. It is only fitting, especially those of us who live in the region of the country that we do, to be spoiled with constant action and perfect chaos from the best College Basketball conference in the country, the Big Ten.
Experts of the game were able to predict that the Big Ten Conference was going to be a gauntlet no matter what happened this year. With the Conference being predicted to make the NCAA tournament, it was expected that teams within the conference would beat up on each other. The catch is, with so many good to elite teams, nobody knew who was going to beat up on who.
Now, after a couple months of Big Ten Basketball, the conference has sorted itself out with even more chaos than we expected. At the midpoint of January, the Big Ten has racked up 6 top 25 ranked teams in the nation. Iowa and Wisconsin are both in the Top 10, which was expected. A big surprise coming out of the first couple months of the season is the fall of the Michigan State Spartans, who have dropped out of the Top 25 and have accumulated a 2-4 record in the conference. It will be interesting to see what Tom Izzo and the Spartans will be able to build in the second half of the season, hopefully leading them to the NCAA tournament.
Perhaps the biggest surprise coming out of the Big 10 are the Michigan Wolverines, who lead the conference to date with only one loss to a Dangerous Minnesota team on their schedule. Juwon Howard has led his team all the way to a number 7 ranking nationally in the country.
With all of this being said, the Big Ten is so deep and talented that there is no say what will happen over the course of the rest of the season. With more than half of the teams being predicted to make March Madness, it is assured that the rest of the season will be as exciting and entertaining as the first half was.
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