Richey | Big Ten a big disappointment (again)

Mar. 24—It's fitting Michigan State kept the Big Ten banner aloft in the NCAA tournament. Only an incredible performance from Kansas State's Markquis Nowell in Thursday night's Sweet 16 matchup at Madison Square Garden kept the Spartans' run from continuing, with the Wildcats holding on for a thrilling 98-93 overtime win.

But it's fitting Michigan State was the last Big Ten team standing because it's been the beacon of NCAA tournament success for the conference. The Spartans, of course, were the last Big Ten team to win it all. Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson and A.J. Granger leading the way.

Yet that was more than two decades ago. Nearly a generation of college basketball fans have never seen a Big Ten team reach the pinnacle of the sport.

That banner the Spartans are flying? It's faded and tattered.

Plenty has been made about the Big Ten being the best conference in college basketball of late. Just not in March, and certainly not come that first Monday in April.

The Pac-12 is in an even worse spot. Its last national championship was so long ago — Arizona in 1997 — that it was still called the Pac-10. But nobody has called the Pac-12 the best conference in the country in any of the last few seasons. The Big Ten has, both by national media and its own coaches. Illinois' Brad Underwood included.

The Big Ten has simply failed to live up to that kind of praise. Failed to produce on the biggest stage despite receiving 8-9 NCAA tournament bids in each of the previous three seasons. The best run in that span, of course, was Michigan State reaching the Final Four in 2019.

But one Sweet 16 team this year, two last year and one the year before despite earning the most bids of any conference in the country is, and has been, a clear disappointment. The NCAA titles since the Big Ten's last have gone mostly to the ACC (eight) and Big East (six), with the Big 12 and SEC nabbing three apiece. The outlier is Connecticut's win in 2014 when it was briefly a "mid-major" in the American Athletic Conference.

So what's the answer for the Big Ten? How does it become a factor when national championships are decided? There have been seven runner-up finishes for the league since 2001. Zero titles.

Axing an irrelevant Big Ten tournament is an idea. It would eliminate another week of the league beating up on each other in a style that mostly won't be replicated come the NCAA tournament. A tournament field that is essentially locked before the Big Ten title game is even played. But those games in Indianapolis or Chicago or (at least next year) Minneapolis are built into the league's multi-billion dollar media rights deal.

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Money talks. Those games stay.

Reducing the inventory of Big Ten games would probably fall under the same umbrella. But the idea of a true round robin conference schedule — 15 games when UCLA and USC join — has some appeal.

For one, it would create a legitimate Big Ten regular-season champion. Then the five games it opens up on each team's schedule would allow the Big Ten to seek out teams and playing styles that would do more to prepare them than the absolute grind that Big Ten has always been.

The coaches simply have to be willing to play those games. Risk taking on a solid mid-major program that could pull an upset. Underwood has said his team will play anybody. Games against low-major teams shouldn't go away — they help prop up those athletic departments financially — but do there have to be a half dozen of them every year?

It's a risk most coaches simply don't seem willing to take from a job security standpoint. Those six cupcakes are a crucial building block to a 20-win season that might feature just enough higher profile wins to reach the NCAA tournament.

There's no advantage to scheduling harder, and that's not just lining up another power conference team for a home-and-home or one-off neutral site game. Those games, win or lose, mostly have little effect on a season résumé. Dropping a game to a frisky mid-major would.

Those highest of high profile games do reveal, however, another area where the Big Ten has fallen behind. Underwood mentioned Arkansas' athleticism several times leading up to last week's first round game in Des Moines, Iowa. Asked for a comp to the Razorbacks the Illini had already seen, he passed over 13 other Big Ten teams and went with Texas.

The best athletes and highest-rated recruits (there's real crossover in those groups) uniformly aren't picking the Big Ten. The conference has landed 18 top-50 recruits the last two seasons. That's more than the 16 the three years before that combined, but it's the SEC and ACC and to a certain extent the Big 12 and Pac-12 that are hauling in the bigger share of future pros.

Not that there isn't talent in the Big Ten. The conference had multiple All-Americans this season in Purdue's Zach Edey, Indiana's Trayce Jackson-Davis, Penn State's Jalen Pickett and Iowa's Kris Murray. It's kind of a trend. The Big Ten had 21 All-Americans combined in the previous five seasons with a heavy emphasis on dominant big men.

Considerably less so on teams actually built for March.