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00:00Why is Big 10 basketball so good, yet so far away from a title?
00:11Yeah, you know, a lot of that's been circumstantial.
00:14They've been in a lot of Final Fours.
00:16The last time I checked, and I haven't checked this in a little while,
00:19but the last time I checked, they had about as many Final Fours, if not more,
00:23than any conference in college basketball since the 2020 season,
00:28or excuse me, the 2000 season, when they won their most recent national championship.
00:33And so they've had a ton of Final Fours.
00:35They just haven't had the right team to get all the way home.
00:38I mean, I think Purdue last year's Purdue team would have won the championship
00:42a lot of years, including probably the prior year against the 2023 UConn team,
00:47but they weren't beating UConn 2024, one of the really terrific teams we've seen
00:52in this century.
00:55Michigan State makes the final in Detroit in 2009.
00:58Well, great, but the team that they played against, Carolina,
01:02was one of the legendary teams in college basketball history.
01:06They were fantastic.
01:07They had four first-round picks on their team.
01:10It's just sometimes it works out like that.
01:12And they have always been a deeper conference than they have been
01:17a conference that produces the absolute elite team.
01:21That's just the way it's been for most of this century.
01:24It's been great for their fans to watch.
01:26It's certainly been great to call on BTN, but producing that one special,
01:32extraordinary team just hasn't happened.
01:35You know, I got to ask you, when you go into this season, do you think that,
01:41like you know how those new teams from the West have come into the Big Ten
01:44in football, what do you think they're going to be like when they come in
01:47on the basketball side?
01:49Well, I think that, first of all, you've got the fact that they were very
01:54careful about scheduling these games.
01:57They've gone more for multiple days of rest, two to three days rest
02:03in between games.
02:05They've been very careful about that, something that wasn't always a high
02:09consideration in conferences like the Pac-12 in the past.
02:12They were used to playing on one-day prep a lot.
02:15Now you get more days of prep, more days of opportunity if you have a bad game
02:20to try to regroup for the next one.
02:22We've seen, to this point, statistically, teams have not performed well
02:27in football when traveling multiple time zones.
02:31But they've performed fine in other sports.
02:33I mean, I pointed out, we talked about this a couple weeks ago,
02:36Pitt's women's volleyball team has been to the West Coast on multiple occasions
02:40already this season and is undefeated wherever they play.
02:44And has only lost one set so far.
02:47So I don't know that the travel is impacting every athlete and every sport.
02:51I think basketball players will do fine with it, especially with the care that,
02:55at least in the Big Ten that's been presented to scheduling,
02:57I'm not saying they haven't in the Big 12 or the ACC,
03:00which are also going to have long trips.
03:02I just haven't studied that.