From Omaha Herald Writer
Sam McKewon
The Big Ten was the best men’s basketball conference in the country and didn’t get a team in the Final Four. It had, by all accounts, the top volleyball conference in the country — six seeds in the top 13 — and didn’t have a team win the national title.
The Big Ten had the Nos. 3 and 4 seeds in the NCAA men’s hockey tournament, and Wisconsin and Minnesota lost to Bemidji State and Minnesota State, respectively, before the Frozen Four. Despite Ohio State’s surge to the title game, Big Ten football was a prolonged series of frustrations, and the women’s Final Four in basketball didn’t include any Big Ten teams.
We’ll see in baseball and softball, but if teams in neither sport make their respective College World Series, it will have been one of the rougher years in recent league history. And it will be hard not to argue that some of the struggles were self-imposed.