What I Learned In ACC-Big Ten School

I was right; it could have been worse than my 7-4 ACC prediction. Unfortunately I did not get the chance to watch any of Tuesday’s action in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge, but after picking up as much as possible via osmosis and the Internet, here’s what I know after three days of basketball:

-- Illinois might not be a tournament team. The Illini are not going to beat Missouri, because Missouri beat Maryland by 14, and they’re not going to beat Arizona, because they’re flat-out not that good. All of this means that come tourney time, Illinois’ best non-conference win is going to be Oklahoma State.

-- This is really a shame, because outside of Michigan State, the Big Ten is just not very good this year. Wisconsin is not as good as advertised, Ohio State is not as good as advertised, even Indiana looked beatable at home.

-- And those were the teams that were supposed to be good. In the second division, Purdue might surprise some people this year, but Iowa is beatable, Michigan and Minnesota are NIT teams at best, Penn State is as forgettable as always and Northwestern is horrible even by Northwestern standards.

-- Michigan State, on the other hand, can play with anyone they’d care to.

-- Brian Randle, who has enough talent that he should have been showing up in big games his whole career, should REALLY start showing up now that he’s a senior.

-- Thad Matta is only a genius when he’s coaching a 7-footer. (But we knew that after reading my preview.)

-- It was awfully nice of Jay Bilas, a former ACC player, to offer an insightful and well-reasoned defense of the Big Ten during a halftime report. He made the point that the ACC has won every challenge only because they’re stronger at the bottom of the conference. In terms of tourney performance, as he pointed out, the Big Ten has been on par with the ACC in recent years.

-- On that note, the ACC didn’t really start dominating the challenge until the conference grew to 12 teams – the first couple events, with two Big Ten teams sitting out, went down to the wire, with the ACC winning 5-4. Now the ACC sits a team and they blow us out. It’s not that their top is a little stronger than our top and their bottom is better than our bottom -- their top is a little stronger than our top, and their middle is way stronger than our bottom!

-- That being the case, maybe there should be a rule that conferences can only have 10 teams. If you have 10 teams and someone leaves for a better conference, you have to pick up a team from another conference and they have to pick up, I don’t know, a crappy independent or something. But if you have fewer than 10 teams, you can’t be a conference. And if you have more than 10 teams, you have to show Minnesota the door.

-- Mostly, though, I know that I was right. I correctly called 8 of the 11 games, and I practically told you that I expected to miss two of the three that I missed. Let’s face it – if you were calling games you wouldn’t have had the stones to pick all of 9 ACC teams either!