Tuesday, 19th March 2024

3/17/2014: State of the Big Ten, Volume 124 (premium)

Posted on 17. Mar, 2014 by in Iowa Basketball, Iowa Football

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Every Monday, we will be running a weekly series titled “State of the Big Ten,” which will be made available to all members of HawkeyeDrive.com. This series of columns will focus on one major headline regarding the conference and go in-depth on the subject at hand.

By Brendan Stiles

HawkeyeDrive.com

Selection Sunday came and went, and in total, the Big Ten has nine teams playing in some type of postseason this March.

There are the obvious six teams that made the NCAA Tournament (including an Iowa squad that has to play in the First Four on March 19 in Dayton), two NIT teams (Illinois and Minnesota) and then there’s Penn State accepting an invitation to play in the CBI. Penn State is following in the footsteps of Purdue, who was the first Big Ten team to play in the CBI last season.

Then there’s Indiana.

The Hoosiers were confident that despite finishing 17-15 and exiting the Big Ten Tournament with a first round loss to Illinois last week, they would still receive an NIT invitation. Except there was one problem — a lot of first place teams from smaller one-bid conferences weren’t winning in their conference tourneys, which automatically puts them in the NIT.

In total, there were 13 such teams that wound up receiving automatic NIT bids and there were only 32 spots in the tourney altogether. While Illinois and Minnesota got in, Indiana wasn’t as fortunate.

Indiana athletics director Fred Glass was quoted as saying, “We’re Indiana,” when asked why the Hoosiers didn’t accept a CBI invite like Penn State did.

One might argue the Hoosiers sound self-entitled in holding this stance. But the reality is Glass is right about this (even though the irony of Indiana turning down an extra home game after what happened to Assembly Hall last month is somewhat amusing). A school like Indiana has no business playing in a tournament like the CBI, nor should it.

What has to be kept in mind is unlike the NCAA and NIT tournaments (where the NCAA facilitates the process), the CBI places everything on the schools that participate. For instance, when Purdue played in the CBI last year, it was responsible for selling all of its tickets and was basically buying the opportunity to play a few extra games inside Mackey Arena.

To be quite honest, it was shocking to see the Boilermakers even play in that tourney and it’s somewhat shocking to see Penn State in it this year (although playing in this does give the Nittany Lions something to build off of next season). Thinking that Indiana is the only Big Ten school that would stick its nose up at the CBI would be naive.

In fact, it’s not even the first Big Ten school to do so. Two years ago, there was uncertainty whether or not Iowa would play in any sort of postseason and debate raged about whether the Hawkeyes should play in the CBI. At that time, Iowa athletics director Gary Barta made clear he wouldn’t agree to it. As it turned out, the Hawkeyes got fortunate and received a NIT berth (and even got a home game against Dayton despite being the lower seed).

The other thing to consider is while a team like Penn State is playing in some type of postseason for the first time under Pat Chambers, Indiana was a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament just last season. The Hoosiers obviously weren’t considered to be anything similar this year, but going 17-15 after winning the Big Ten a year ago is a disappointment, especially for a program such as Indiana.

So yeah, there’s no reason to blame Glass or Indiana for making the decision it made. Not to mention they should all probably be putting their attention towards the renovations taking place there and ensuring another piece of metal doesn’t fall from the ceiling again.

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