Big Ten basketball gets underway on Tuesday evening as each team in the league plays two games in December.
To help frame the hierarchy going into league play, we created a composite of six well known analytical college basketball models: KenPom, Bart Torvik, EvanMiya, Haslametrics, ESPN’s BPI and the NCAA’s NET rankings.
All rankings are through games played on Monday evening.
The consensus top team is Michigan, with Purdue coming in as the consensus No. 2. They are both national top-four teams in the average of the six models.
After that things get more interesting, with Michigan State, Illinois and Indiana neck-and-neck for the three through five spots.
Under first year coach Ben McCollum, Iowa has made a notable jump to No. 6.
Things are still packed pretty tight in the No. 7 through 13 spots, and then there’s some separation to the bottom five.
Indiana opens league play Wednesday at Minnesota.
Here is a composite look at the rankings across the six analytic sites:
The full Big Ten standings headed into league play are below, and the schedule of December league games follows. Both are via the Big Ten:
| Tuesday, Dec. 2 | Iowa at Michigan State |
| Purdue at Rutgers | |
| USC at Oregon | |
| Wednesday, Dec. 3 | Indiana at Minnesota |
| UCLA at Washington | |
| Northwestern at Wisconsin | |
| Saturday, Dec. 6 | Maryland at Iowa |
| Ohio State at Northwestern | |
| Rutgers at Michigan | |
| Oregon at UCLA | |
| Washington at USC | |
| Tuesday, Dec. 9 | Penn State at Indiana |
| Illinois at Ohio State | |
| Wednesday. Dec. 10 | Wisconsin at Nebraska |
| Minnesota at Purdue | |
| Saturday, Dec. 13 | Nebraska at Illinois |
| Michigan at Maryland | |
|
Michigan State at Penn State |
For complete coverage of IU basketball, GO HERE.
The Daily Hoosier –“Where Indiana fans assemble when they’re not at Assembly”
- You can follow us on X: @daily_hoosier and find us on Facebook and Instagram
- Seven ways to support completely free IU coverage at no cost to you.
