Big Ten Basketball: Updated Predictions

With the December Big Ten games and most of the non-conference season in the books, it is a good time to re-evaluate preseason expectations and see where Illinois stacks up in the conference.

Please note that these are not power rankings (if they were, UCLA and Oregon would be much lower and Nebraska much higher), but an estimation of where these teams will be in the Big Ten standings at the end of the year. They are divided into tiers based on postseason expectation.

Tier 6: No Postseason

18. Rutgers (5-6, 0-2)

Best Win: 80-65 over Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn and UNLV. It’s the only top 200 team on Torvik that the Scarlet Knights have gotten this year.

Worst Loss: A 67-54 loss to the Blue Devils doesn’t sound so bad, until you find out it is the Central Connecticut Blue Devils, and not the Dukies. Scoring 54 points against a Northeast Conference opponent is unfathomable.

Good News: Dylan Grant has made a nice sophomore jump. He is averaging 14.6 points and 6.2 rebounds on efficient 50/46/74 shooting splits. He’d be a very good number two. Unfortunately, Rutgers probably needs him to be more aggressive and push the scoring up near 20 because…

Bad News: Their offense is atrocious. They actually make threes at a respectable 34.8% rate, but don’t take enough of them to be successful, and their two-point percentage of 44.4% is the worst of any power conference team in the country. They have played five power conference teams to dateand have yet to score more than 65 points in those games. Unsurprisingly, they are all losses.

17. Penn State (8-3, 0-2)

Best Win: 83-69 over La Salle on a neutral court. La Salle is 238th on Torvik, so the real answer is no one, despite being 8-3 on the season.

Worst Loss: Penn State did the disgusting act of making Indiana look like a dangerous team in their Big Ten opener, losing 113-72. They were already down by 32 points at half, and they allowed Lamar Wilkerson to make 10 threes and score 44 points.

Good News: Their biggest recruit ever has lived up to…

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Publish date : 2025-12-18 11:00:00

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