Purdue and Illinois have a reasonable chance to win their next few games to basically set up the B1G-W division championship on November 12th in Champagne-Urbana. But do we trust these teams to not drop a WTF game at some point this year?
Illinois already did. Their loss to Indiana gets more and more inexplicable each week.
Based on how PSU looked in Ann Arbor, Purdue's loss to the Nittany Lions might be theirs.
You make a good point about the PU at IL game on November 12 being a likely defacto B1G-W Championship Game. Not only are Purdue and Illinois co-leaders at 3-1, but their losses were non-divisional so they have a leg up in the tiebreakers if it should come to that. Let's look a little deeper at the rest of the West:
2-2 Nebraska is next but the Cornhuskers are 0-2 in the division with losses to Purdue and Northwestern. They have this week off but if they lose to Illinois next week they'll be pretty much finished at 2-3 in the league and 0-3 in the division.
1-2 Northwestern is theoretically ahead of the other 1-2 teams because they are 1-1 in the division with a win over Nebraska and a loss to UW. They technically control their own destiny since they would win a tie with Nebraska, they haven't played PU or IL yet, and the team that beat them has more losses than they do.
1-2 Iowa is 0-1 in the division with a loss to IL. They need help but they could get there. They need to figure out how to generate points on offense though.
1-2 Minnesota is clearly in the worst shape of the 1-2 teams both because they are 0-2 in the division and because their two losses were to the two co-leaders. They need a LOT of help.
1-3 Wisconsin is 1-1 in the division. The biggest obstacle is that the loss was to 3-1 Illinois which means that the Badgers are effectively three games behind the Illini so they need all kinds of help.