The Big Ten is really, really, good at basketball this year.

Player of the year candidates Trey Burke (3) and Victor Oladipo (4)

The Big 10 (which has 12 schools now, the entire conference system is becoming a joke) has played a whole other level of college basketball this season than the rest of the country.  It's got 4 teams ranked in the top 10: #3 Indiana, #6 Michigan, #8 Michigan State, and #10 Ohio State; any of whom could earn a #1 seed in the big dance by winning the conference tournament, which starts Thursday.  Just how good are they?

The Michigan Wolverines are ranked #6 in the nation, but are the 5th seed in the Big Ten's tournament.  At 25-6 they managed to pull that off because all 6 of their losses came in conference.  Their 12-6 Big 10 record put them in a tie for 4th place with #22 Wisconsin.

And on a totally unrelated (but still slightly related) note, I just learned yesterday that John Stockton's son David plays for #1 Gonzaga.  Back before the school started winning NCAA Tournament games and everybody still pronounced it Gon-zah-ga, pretty much the only thing it was known for was being John Stockton's alma mater.  Get ready to hear about this roughly 10,000 times starting next week.  Also I'm fairly certain I'd written around 750 posts on this blog without ever mentioning John Stockton, and now his name's come up on back to back days.  Weird.

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