In Reply to: I think this team continues to make incremental improvements. posted by ej on December 19, 2025 at 13:44:04
I agree that the road trip you mention is going to be huge—not because I expect us to break into the top tier of the conference, which in my view is clearly Michigan, Michigan State, and Purdue—but because Iowa, and to a lesser extent Wisconsin, are the teams we’ll be competing with for second-tier positioning.
You can probably add Illinois, Nebraska, Ohio State, Indiana, and USC to that Tier 2 mix as well. Most of those teams have NET rankings that are comparable to, or better than, ours, with the exception of Wisconsin—but that game is in Madison and will be a dogfight regardless.
If we drop both of those games, we put ourselves in a tough spot. Right now, we only have one Quad 1 win, and if we don’t get the Iowa win, things could get ugly in terms of building a Quad 1 résumé, especially with very limited opportunities until February.
Even tho I really like our team, getting a bad seed in the tournament is going to make it very difficult to have a nice run.