At the beginning of conference play last season, my buddy Ben Goren, a Northwestern alum who’s seen his fair share of bad college hoops, tweeted this, which I have dubbed the Big Ten Lizard:
An entire thread of two months’ worth of Bad Basketball Games from Big Ten teams follows this initial tweet. As this series of tweets demonstrates, the Big Ten was not a good basketball conference during the 2017-18 season. The metrics back this up - in KenPom ratings, the B1G was fifth out of the six major conferences, only beating out the Pac-12. Meanwhile, only 4 B1G teams out of 14 made the tourney, and while all these teams were a 5-seed or above, there wasn’t much depth to speak of in the conference.