Where Do We Stand? March 12th
The final WDWS of the year. I won't write one next week because the NCAA Committee will tell us exactly where we stand this Sunday at 5:00 pm. It won't matter what I think or what KenPom thinks or what anyone else thinks. The Committee will release their seeds and that will tell us Where We Stand.
Maybe the best way to start this one is to go back through the IlliniBoard NERDstat Index and see where we've stood this entire season. Every Tuesday I would compile the rankings from KenPom, Bart Torvik, Evan Miyakawa, and ESPN's BPI to come up with consensus rankings for the Big Ten. And we were second in the Big Ten every week since. Wisconsin and Michigan State got close, and Wisconsin was even T2 with us at one point (before their collapse), but the Big Ten was Purdue 1, Illinois 2 on December 5th and it's Purdue 1, Illinois 2 on March 12th.
Here's the rankings. I missed two weeks in here (one in December, one in January), but the Illini national ranking for each I-N-I: