Michigan State, Purdue, Illinois, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Michigan. Penn State, and Minnesota are predicted to make the Big Ten tournament by ESPN.com's bracketologist Joe Lunardi. My bet would be that at least one, probably two of these teams won't make the tournament. Michigan still has to play Purdue, and Wisconsin in Madison. I don't think they're good enough to make the tourney. Of course, we should ask ourselves, are the Gophers? I think that our perfect non-conference season will just barely push us in, but we need to win at least 2 preferably 3 of the final 4 here, and/or have a good showing at the Big Ten tourney. Out remaining games:

at home vs. Northwestern. Even though they beat us the first time, I think we'll be desparate enough to take this one. And hopefully we'll have a good home field advantage.

Illinois in Champaign. Even though we beat the Illini the first go-round, I doubt that that carries over to this game. We haven't beaten them in Champaign in, oh, forever (probably before I was born, and that ain't no joke). I may be proven wrong though. They only scored 33 against Penn State the other day.

at home vs. Wisconsin. This one's really hard to predict. On one hand, we've already beaten the Badgers, at Kohl Center, nonetheless.But that was a very long time ago. We've been spiraling downwards, and they're been on fire defensively, allowing below 53 points in 5 straight games now. I'm not sure if we can beat them in the Barn.

at home vs. Michigan. If we can prevent Michigan from catching fire like they did last night, I think we have a chance to beat them on our home floor. The game will probably be determining all kinds of Big Ten and NCAA tourney seeding and bid and such, so I'd expect both teams to give it their all. Unfortunately, Michigan's all probably beats our all.

Well, good news, 3 home games. Bad news, none of them are pushovers, and two of them have already beaten us. Time is running out if we're going to make the NCAAs.

Hi everyone! Recently, I was bored in my basement. Since I am a math nerd, the obvious thing to occupy my time was to create a mathematical way to predict the outcome of the Big Ten basketball season. I've done this type of thing before with football, so I already knew my basic process... If you don't like math as much as I do, feel free to skip my explanation and go right to the results of the "study", at the bottom of the post.

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