What’s behind the Big Ten’s basketball title drought?

Michael Cohen

College Football and College Basketball Writer

NEW YORK — Immediately after his players were dismissed from a somber postgame news conference on Thursday night, following Michigan State’s heartbreaking 98-93 loss to third-seeded Kansas State in overtime, head coach Tom Izzo was asked to describe his thought process amid a portion of the second half when both teams seemed incapable of missing shots. The Spartans made seven of their eight field goal attempts in the span of seven minutes; the Wildcats connected on eight of nine shots in a similar stretch.

Izzo’s response meandered from a pregame message he shared with his team about the importance of every possession to a backbreaking missed free throw by forward Joey Hauser, an 88% shooter from the line, with 5:54 remaining. He mentioned how proud he was of point guard A.J. Hoggard for willing a few layups through the hoop down the stretch and said New York City native Tyson Walker felt the pressure of playing at home in the early portion of a thrilling game.

Eventually, Izzo arrived at the point he really wanted to make.

“I think for me,” Izzo said, “I played for the Big Ten, too. It was really important to me (to keep fighting) when you’ve been in a league 40 years that you love and cherish and you know how good it is — and we can’t get another national championship. Even that stuff is on my mind because I know how good my league is, and I know how good the teams are and the coaches are. Yet it never looks good when you don’t have a team moving on through the Sweet 16.”

There were eight teams from the Big Ten granted entry to this year’s NCAA Tournament, with regular season and postseason champion Purdue atop the pile as the No. 1 seed in the East region. Anchored by consensus All-American Zach Edey, who averaged 22.3 points and 12.9 rebounds per game, the Boilermakers believed they could reach the Final Four for the first time since 1980, when head coach Matt Painter was in elementary school.

But a stunning loss to 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson cast a shadow of embarrassment over Purdue, Painter, and the league at large, as a flurry of first-weekend defeats left seventh-seeded Michigan State as the conference’s only representative in the Sweet 16. And when the Spartans fell short against Kansas State in a thriller at Madison Square Garden, the Big Ten found itself without a participant in the regional finals for the second consecutive tournament despite having 17 bites at the cherry. The league’s national title drought will extend at least another year — Michigan State remains the last team to cut down the nets, in 2000, when Izzo was in his fifth season — and Wisconsin is the lone Big Ten school with something still to play for as an NIT semifinalist.

“No matter what anybody says, top to bottom, I have no problem standing up and saying we have the best league in the country,” Izzo said after his team’s loss to the Wildcats. “When you have that number of teams beating the hell out of each other every day, I don’t think we’re worn out from it, I just think you get a bad seed from it. So we had all these teams with 7-, 8-, and 9-seeds. I’m not saying that was wrong, but that’s what happens when — I’d like to see some teams come in and survive this league and the places we play.”

Izzo’s suggestion that a rigorous Big Ten schedule saddles its members with middling NCAA Tournament seeds, thus lowering the league’s chances of winning a national title is, at best, a partial truth. He’s correct in saying teams seeded outside the top three lines are highly unlikely to hoist the trophy, and the last four decades offer irrefutable proof.

Beginning in 1985, as the tournament expanded to 64 teams, more than 89% of eventual champions were either 1-seeds, 2-seeds or 3-seeds. The lone exceptions were seventh-seeded UConn in 2014, fourth-seeded Arizona in 1997, sixth-seeded Kansas in 1988 and eighth-seeded Villanova in 1985. Some 24 of the tournament’s 37 winners during that span had a No. 1 next to their name.

Where Izzo’s argument begins to fall apart is with his insinuation that the Big Ten has seen a larger percentage of its teams seeded near the middle of the bracket as the competitiveness of the league improves. The 22 NCAA Tournaments since the Big Ten last cut down the nets can be divided in half to better reflect some of the high-profile coaching changes that have revamped the conference, and the seeding data from 2001-11 compared to 2012-23 doesn’t quite land as Izzo intended.

While it’s true the Big Ten has endured an uptick in 7-seeds during the first half of its national title famine — from six in the early window to 11 in the more recent period — the rest of the numbers tell a vastly different story. The 8- and 9-seeds have both decreased from five to four as one decade transitioned to another, and the league’s presence at the top of each region has swelled considerably over the last 11 years:

— The number of times a Big Ten school received a 1-seed increased from four to five.

— The number of times a Big Ten school received a 2-seed increased from four to 10.

— The number of times a Big Ten school received a 3-seed increased from three to six.

— The number of times a Big Ten school received a 4-seed increased from eight to 10.

In other words, the league’s inability to win a national title has persisted despite having 10 more teams seeded on the top three lines from 2012-23 than it did in the 11 years prior. And 21 of the 22 champions from that timeframe were seeded first, second or third.

“I think we get worn down as a league,” Maryland head coach Kevin Willard said prior to his team’s first-round win over West Virginia. “Has nothing to do with reffing, nothing to do with scheduling. I think what it has to do with (is) we played three straight games and we went against Zach Edey, Hunter Dickinson, Steven Crowl, and then we had to come back a week and a half later and get Zack Edey and Hunter Dickinson again. They are such good players, and it’s a very physical league because of the size that’s in the league.

“I do think as the year goes on, I saw it, you do get worn down, and then you have your conference tournament that ends on Sunday (instead of Saturday). Purdue won at 4:30, 5 o’clock in the afternoon and now they have to get ready to play in the NCAA Tournament. It’s really cool playing on CBS at that slot. I have watched every Big Ten Championship game for as long as I can remember because it’s really exciting, and you are waiting for Selection Sunday. I do feel the size of the league and the timing of the tournament (are legitimate factors).”

Despite the proliferation of higher-seeded teams, the Big Ten’s advancement rate in the NCAA Tournament has remained static over the last two decades aside from a handful of additional Sweet 16 participants. Even with improved odds of placing teams in the Elite Eight, Final Four and national title game, the league has only marginally delivered:

— Elite Eight appearances increased from 10 to 12, decade over decade.

— Final Four appearances were unchanged between 2001-11 (six) and 2012-13 (six).

— Entrants to the national title game increased from two to three.

But as the only holdover from one era to the next, from the league’s last national championship to its latest pangs of frustration in 2023, Izzo dug in his heels. He pushed back against any suggestion that the Big Ten is overrated — or, at the very least, overvalued — and landed on a silver lining despite assuring the media he’s a glass-half-empty kind of guy.

“I’m proud of my team,” Izzo said. “But I’m proud of the league, too. Disappointment is disappointment. But I think as a 7-seed, maybe we showed how good our league was instead of, like some people (are saying), the other way around.”

Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with an emphasis on the Big Ten. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_Cohen13.

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