Many years ago, the NIT tourney tried to spoon feed us easy early round teams, in the hopes that we would make the final four at the garden....and then the attendance for that would be decent
we had a home game against Yale, I believe, and our coach was trying stress this and that in practice before, when one of our players said something like
("come on coach, its Yale!)
and, then we proceeded to lose
I am sure the attitude is a bit more resolved, even more so when it is a big ten team, and all big ten teams have talent