Better Know a Conference: Big Ten

I want to live forever, I don't care

Better Know a Conference is Buzzer’s league-by-league preview of the 2024-25 season, featuring detailed but legible takes on every team in every major league — and other conferences and mid-majors along the way — in rough order of expected finish.

To read the full series (and start posting on the best college hoops comment section on the Internet!) consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Today: The Big Ten, Part One, because the post got long and it turns out there are 18 teams in this league now. Who knew?!

You have to give the Big Ten credit: It is a league that understands how to market itself. On their face, the additions of UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington are a hilarious betrayal of the league’s origins to a degree even Rutgers and Maryland didn’t approach, to say nothing of the role the B1G had (er, is having) in exploding a century’s worth of understood locally oriented college sports status quo for the sake of its own disfigured future.

And yet, somehow — sigh — the commercial still slaps:

Maybe it’s just impossible to have attended a Big Ten institution and not feel some overwhelming sense of nostalgia and coziness while this ad plays. Has any advertisement more obliquely, yet more exactingly, evoked the feeling of returning to your alma mater for a tailgate? Maybe it’s the design of the titular map, the way it manages to compress the giant expanse of the western United States into a snap flyover that skips from Los Angeles to Lincoln (distance: 1,497 miles) in half a second. Maybe it’s the way the final shot makes schools the same distance apart as Lisbon and İstanbul look like they’re in the same neighborhood.

Whatever it is, if you thought the Big Ten was going to abandon this campaign because it colonized the west coast over the summer, and thus fundamentally altered its nature, you thought wrong. It’s going to keep pretending — quite effectively! — that all of these universities belong here. That they, and thus you, are home. You want to live forever. You don’t care.

Just as undeniable? The new B1G’s basketball strength. Say what you want about the logistical abomination this league has become, but, hey, UCLA is usually going to be good. Indeed, Bart Torvik projects this overstuffed league to finish all 18 of its teams in the top 100 per-possession. It will be a boisterous, chaotic gauntlet — certainly in 2024-25, and likely for years to come.

Purdue

If there is one unifying principle among most Big Ten previews already out in the world, it is as follows: There is no clear top team in the league. You could make a case for any number of potential contenders, any of six or seven or even eight teams. The league is in transition! It’s wide open! Parity! No great teams! And so on.

Allow this preview to respectfully disagree: Purdue is the best team in the Big Ten. We should assume this to be true until confronted with overwhelming evidence that it is not.

This is not merely deference to Matt Painter and his staff, although deference is worth baking in to any Purdue prospectus. Painter has become as adept as any coach in the country at molding a roster that works, figuring problems out on the fly, elevating previous role players into starting roles and priors starters into stars. He runs great stuff for good players every time down the floor; he maximizes strengths and minimizes weaknesses. He is in the program-building sweet spot: Almost regardless of personnel, one way or another you expect him to compete, at minimum, for a Big Ten title.

It’s also, mostly, because the aforementioned evidence isn’t here. This team just looks good. Yes, there is the Vredefort-sized absence of Zach Edey to contend with, and you can’t replace Edey or (cue the “Moneyball” meme) recreate him in the aggregate. But Purdue can simultaneously miss one of the best college basketball players of all time and have some very good players ready to step in.

This is probably the best, and certainly the most proven, backcourt in the conference: Braden Smith has a chance to be a genuine national star this season, if he wasn’t already, while Fletcher Loyer morphed into an elite shooter a season ago, with yet more headroom for improvement as a finisher inside the arc. Rising sophomores Cam Heide and Myles Colvin were obviously talented enough in minimal run (both as flexible perimeter defenders and floor-spacing shooters) that they should be viable starters in year two. I’ve long been a fan of Caleb Furst, a talented kid who has always found himself behind some of the best bigs in the country (and/or Mason Gillis, an important glue player who just transferred to Duke). Assuming one of the 7-foot freshman Painter has recruited — because of course — doesn’t pop right away, Furst has a chance to really breathe as a senior.

And then there’s Trey Kaufman-Renn.