Hard to say so far. Part of the problem for this year is perception. We have several schools that traditionally are top half of the Big Ten that are underperforming this year. Michigan, OSU, Iowa, Indiana, and maybe even MSU have all had disappointing years so far. So, while Minnesota, Nebraska, and Northwestern appear to be better than expected teams this year, there's still this weird questioning about "well, are they really top half of the Big Ten, or are just the traditional powerhouse teams down to the point where it's just one big morass of 'meh'?"
Conversely to Wisconsin, Purdue is actually getting into the easier portion of their schedule. The next eight games are:
Mich
@Rut
NW (Major revenge game)
@Wisc
IU
Minn
@OSU
Rut
3 road games, and only the 1 road game is against a tier 1 team (a much easier road than Wisconsin's next 8 which is 5 road games and 2 tier-1 home games). Outside of the Wisconsin game and maybe the OSU game, I'm not particularly worried about those games, but that is also a recipe for getting upset, so hopefully the team takes the "1 game at a time" mantra seriously.
I suspect it's all going to come down to those last three games where Wisconsin, Illinois, and Purdue all play each other.
...and then there's March....
At this point, I would absolutely take an Elite 8 / Final 4 run instead of a BT title. We gotta get that "double digit seed loss" monkey off our backs. We've just been burned too many times for us to really get too cocky about how "elite" we are. Which is ridiculous. We've literally played the hardest schedule in college basketball this year (#1 on Kenpom) and have mostly survived, and it's all going to mean exactly dick if we don't get to at least the elite eight this year. Anything else will be extremely disappointing.
