At Big Ten Media Day back in October, there was a clear-cut choice as to who would be voted as the preseason favorite to win the conference. With four starters returning from a team that made the Final Four one season prior, that choice was Wisconsin.
Other teams in the Big Ten have been chasing the Badgers since then. And most of them have been unsuccessful.
As we sit here Feb. 18, Wisconsin is 23-2 overall and 11-1 in the Big Ten. It is a full three games ahead of Maryland, Purdue and Michigan State in the loss column with only six games remaining. The Big Ten race is all but over, but it never really got started. That's how dominant the Badgers have been all year.
At the beginning of every season, teams set goals for themselves. Often times, the No. 1 goal on that list is winning the regular-season conference title. For some teams, those goals are more realistic than others. Michigan State, Ohio State, Indiana and some others probably thought they had a legitimate opportunity to challenge Wisconsin for the league crown.
But sometimes things don't work out like originally planned and that's OK. That's just the way the college basketball world works.
The Buckeyes are no different. They've been up-and-down throughout the majority of the season. Every time it seems like Ohio State has finally found its footing, it loses a tough game on the road or has a slip up somewhere.
The result has the Buckeyes all but out of the Big Ten regular-season race at 19-7 overall and 8-5 in the league. Head coach Thad Matta — who has won five Big Ten titles in his 11 seasons at Ohio State — will have to wait at least one more year to try and get his sixth.
But for Matta and the Buckeyes, that's OK.
“I won’t address it," Matta said Monday on the Big Ten coaches weekly teleconference. "I think in the years when we were in the driver’s seat for winning the Big Ten we never talked about winning the Big Ten or anything else."
Ohio State doesn't worry about what's going on around it in the conference. It just wants to improve each time it takes the floor.
"It’s more along the lines of how do we get better, how do we play at the level we need to play at for the next game," Matta said. "I’ve always kind of kept it that way.”
The Buckeyes, of course, aren't mathematically eliminated from the Big Ten regular-season title, but there's not much hope remaining. Wisconsin can seemingly clinch the title within the next couple of games.
Next for Ohio State is winning enough games to finish in the Top 4 of the Big Ten to receive a double bye in the conference tournament and improving its NCAA tournament resume enough to move up on the seeding line when Selection Sunday comes.
The Buckeyes have a manageable schedule the rest of the way and will likely be favorites in their next four games before ending the season against the Badgers in Columbus.
“We’ve got to continue to play like this,” Matta said on his weekly call-in radio show. “Everybody’s gotta be on the same page and that’s what we talked about when we got back to Columbus.”
