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In the mid-90s, after a series of big-time Big Ten flops in the men’s NCAA basketball tournament, a host of experts and critics said the league hadn’t adjusted to the younger, quicker game epitomized by the programs at Duke, Kentucky, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina.
But others noted that just a few years earlier, the Big Ten had been among the more dominant conferences in the country, featuring Michigan’s Fab Five as well as great teams from Indiana, Ohio State, and Illinois. The problem, according to this line of thinking, was that Big Ten teams weren’t tourney-tested when they showed up for the NCAAs. While just about every other league held tournaments to end conference play, the Big Ten stuck with a regular round-robin schedule that simply didn’t get teams ready for the do-or-die atmosphere of the Big Dance.
