College Basketball Betting: Big Ten Conference Preview

The 2021-2022 college basketball season will be interesting for so many different reasons. One is that the Big Ten – easily the deepest college basketball conference last season – tries to reload and remain the toughest conference in the country. The Big Ten put nine teams in the 2021 NCAA Tournament, and four of them were seeded No. 1 or No. 2. That is a tremendous regular-season result in terms of putting a large number of teams in March Madness and in terms of creating high-quality teams which had a chance to make deep runs.

The bad part for the Big Ten last March is that none of its nine teams made the Final Four. Michigan fell one basket short in its Elite Eight loss to UCLA. No. 2 seed Ohio State lost to a 15 seed, Oral Roberts. No. 1 seed Illinois was ambushed in the second round by Loyola-Chicago. Purdue was a No. 4 seed and lost in the first round to No. 13 seed North Texas. Iowa was a No. 2 seed and got blown out in the second round by Oregon. The Big Ten did so much last season, but before March. The conference will try to replicate the 2021 regular season but make a big leap forward in March of 2022. Let’s see what happens.

Team Likely To Surprise

The Wisconsin Badgers were surprisingly bad last season. They didn’t shoot well, which was a shock, given that the 2020 team (which won the Big Ten regular-season title before the pandemic hit and canceled the 2020 NCAA Tournament) was largely back for the 2021 season. The faces on the roster were largely the same, but the team played far worse than it did the year before. Bad shooting aside, the chemistry on the roster simply didn’t exist the way it previously had. Coach Greg Gard tried desperately to get all the pieces to fit, but he kept swinging and missing. There is a feeling that in 2022, Wisconsin has a lot of unfinished business to tend to, probably more than any other Big Ten team with the possible exception of Purdue. The Badgers are going to be mad and very intense as they enter the new season. Expect this team to fight back and attain a much better place in the conference standings than many pundits expect.

Team Likely To Disappoint

The Indiana Hoosiers have a new coach, Mike Woodson, and they retained one of the best players in the conference, Trayce Jackson-Davis. There are reasons to think Indiana will finally begin to reach its potential again. Yet, the supporting cast is filled with question marks, and after a coaching change, it is anything but guaranteed that the continuity of this team will exist at the level it needs to. Indiana is going to be a bubble team, not a shoo-in to make the NCAA Tournament. That itself counts as a disappointment, though if Indiana at least makes March Madness, that will still be a step forward for the program. Progress is not going to be substantial; if anything, it will be very slight at best.

Conference Champion

The Purdue Boilermakers get big man Trevion Williams back for another season. Purdue will battle Michigan, the 2021 Big Ten champion, for the 2022 championship. Purdue’s first-round loss in March Madness will give the Boilermakers an extra edge heading into this year. This will be a veteran roster which was viewed as being a year away in 2021. This is supposed to be the big breakthrough for the Boilermakers.