Indiana - Wisconsin
- Thread starter BigEastPhil
- Start date
Same here. Someone is going to be at the bottom. Let it be Nebraska, PSU, Maryland, Indiana, and Northwestern. Put Purdue in the top of that neighborhood. Then we are top 8 minimum with a chance for top four.
Northwestern scored 13 points in the second half. Very hard to make sense of this conference after the top four of Illinois, Iowa, Michi, Wisco (not in that order). I think the middle is good and any team can outperform any given night. That Illinois win is big for us
I just do not think Northwestern is that good. They surprised a Michigan State team who has struggled, beat a shaky Indiana and an equally shaky OSU. The last 3 games they are showing they are not for real for the long tern. They will win some games but I would surprised to see them out of the bottom 4.
Indiana doesn't have a true ball handler or final shot taker. Jackson-Davis is good but he's not a jump shooter and its easy for other teams to deny him final shots. You could see it on the final play of regulation when Al Durham gets tied up by Brad Davison, there's no shotmaker on that team.
It's very hard to see wins coming in bunches when a team has a 15 point lead built against a Top 10 team turn into a 25 point loss.
NW is probably somewhere in between, but everyone's schedule seems like a gauntlet.
NW....next few games (3-3 in B1G)
At Ohio State
Iowa
At Penn State (covid19??)
At Wisconsin
Rutgers
Michigan
At Purdue
Indiana
At Rutgers
At Illinois
Wisconsin
At Minnesota
Maryland
Nebraska
If Penn State can't get their covid19 under control, there's not a lot of good chances there on the road. NW still shoots well enough to beat teams at home, but gonna be a bear of a slate.
NW is probably somewhere in between, but everyone's schedule seems like a gauntlet.
NW....next few games (3-3 in B1G)
At Ohio State
Iowa
At Penn State (covid19??)
At Wisconsin
Rutgers
Michigan
At Purdue
Indiana
At Rutgers
At Illinois
Wisconsin
At Minnesota
Maryland
Nebraska
If Penn State can't get their covid19 under control, there's not a lot of good chances there on the road. NW still shoots well enough to beat teams at home, but gonna be a bear of a slate.
Suprise or no surprise , Northwestern beat MSU, Indiana and Ohio State back to back to back. They were also up 15 on Illinois before getting I guess steamrolled in the second half. They seem legitimate to stay in the middle of the pack out of the bottom 4 because they shoot well enough to get some wins against the middle.
From the Northwestern perspective, our team is good, but some others are better. Guess we had to show you if Rutgers can go low in the second half, we can go lower.
What has really killed us the last couple of games is that Boo Buie, our most creative player, has been a serious non-factor. He was good all last year and had 30 when we beat Michigan State, but I think he had 0 last night and didn't do much against Iowa, either. Whether he's in a sophomore slump or injured or something else I have no idea, but NU is not going to win without more from him. The other guard, Audige, is a transfer from William & Mary and I don't think he's fully caught up with the B1G yet. Also, while we have height, we don't have a lot of thick bodies to go up against the likes of Cockburn and the kid from Michigan. We end up having to double team down low, and if the other team's three-point shooters get hot, like Bohannon from Iowa did against us, we're screwed.
And not to go for sympathy, because everyone in the league is in the same boat this season, but that was the fourth top 25 team NU has played in a row, and it just looked as if the Cats ran out of gas in the second half. Collins has recruited fairly well, but with many of us the jury is still out on whether he can coach up the guys he gets. We thought we were on an upward trend when we made the tourney a couple of years back, but results since then have been mediocre at best. This league brutally exposes weakness.
Good luck against Ohio State at the RAC. I'm hoping both our teams will bounce back from the recent debacles.
Look at the front end of Michigan’s schedule. Boy were they treated nicely. I feel your pain with that schedule. Back when we were in the Big east, we scheduled UNC as our last out of conference game of the year. I’ pretty sure we played 3 top five teams in a row because the Big East gave us the top two teams in the league to open conference play.
Yeah, Buie's recent lack of production is pretty perplexing. He seems to make your team "go," a lot like our Jacob Young.